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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY:
A STUDY OF THE RELATION
OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION

BY JOHN DEWEY

GIFFORD

LECTURES

1929

NEW YORKrMINTON, BALCH
& COMPANY t+ae**^ 1919

COPYRIGHT, 1929
by JOHN DEWEY

Second Printing, October, 1929.
Third Printing, December, 1V29.

Printed in the United States of America by

J. J. UTTLB AND IVES COMPANY. NEW YORK

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I ESCAPE FROM PERIL 3

ii PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMU-
TABLE 26

III CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES .... 49

IV THE ART OF ACCEPTANCE AND THE ART OF

CONTROL 74

V IDEAS AT WORK IO8

VI THE PLAY OF IDEAS 140

VII THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY . 1 70

VIII THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE . 1 95

IX THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD .... 223

X THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD .... 254

XI THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION . . . 287

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

CHAPTER I
ESCAPE FROM PERIL

MAN WHO LIVES in a world of hazards is compelled to seek
for security. He has sought to attain it in two ways. One of
them 'began with an attempt to propitiate the powers which
environ him and determine his destiny. It expressed itself in
supplication, sacrifice, ceremonial rite and magical cult. In time
these crude methods were largely displaced. The sacrifice of a
contrite heart was esteemed more pleasing than that of bulls
and oxenj the inner attitude of reverence and devotion more
desirable than external ceremonies. If man could not conquer
destiny he could willingly ally himself with itj putting his
will, even in sore affliction, on the side of the powers which
dispense fortune, he could escape defeat and might triumph in
the midst of destruction.

The other course is to invent arts and by their means turn
the powers of nature to account j man constructs a fortress out
of the very conditions and forces which threaten him. He
builds shelters, weaves garments, makes flame his friend instead
of his enemy, and grows into the complicated arts of associated
living. This is the method of changing the world through
action, as the other is the method of changing the self in emo-
tion and idea. It is a commentary on the slight control man
has obtained over himself by means of control over nature, that
the method of action has been felt to manifest dangerous pride,
even defiance of the powers which be. People of old wavered
between thinking arts to be the gift of the gods and to be an
invasion of their prerogatives. Both versions testify to the sense

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

of something extraordinary in the arts, something either super-
human or unnatural. The souls who have predicted that by
means of the arts man might establish a kingdom of order,
justice and beauty through mastery of nature's energies and
laws have been few and little heeded.

Men have been glad enough to enjoy the fruits of such arts
as they possess, and in recent centuries have increasingly de-
voted themselves to their multiplication. But this effort has
been conjoined with a profound distrust of the arts as a method
of dealing with the serious perils of life. Doubt as to the truth
of this statement will be dispelled if one considers the dis-
esteem in which the idea of practice has been held. Philosophers
have celebrated the method of change in personal ideas, and
religious teachers that of change in the affections of the heart.
These conversions have been prized on their own account, and
only incidentally because of a change in action which would
ensue. The latter has been esteemed as an evidence of the
change in thought and sentiment, not as a method of trans-
forming the scene of life. The places in which the use of the
arts has effected actual objective transformation have been
regarded as inferior, if not base, and the activities connected
with them as menial. The disparagement attending the idea of
the material has seized upon them. The honorable quality asso-
ciated with the idea of the "spiritual" has been reserved for
change in inner attitudes.

The depreciation of action, of doing and making, has been
cultivated by philosophers. But while philosophers have per-
petuated the derogation by formulating and justifying it, they
did not originate it. They glorified their own office without
doubt in placing theory so much above practice. But indepen-
dently of their attitude, many things conspired to the same
effect. Work has been onerous, toilsome, associated with a
primeval curse. It has been done under compulsion and the

4

ESCAPE FROM PERIL

pressure of necessity, while intellectual activity is associated
with leisure. On account of the unpleasantness of practical
activity, as much of it as possible has been put upon slaves and
serfs. Thus the social dishonor in which this class was held was
extended to the work they do. There is also the age-long
association of knowing and thinking with immaterial and
spiritual principles, and of the arts, of all practical activity in
doing and making, with matter. For work is done with the
body, by means of mechanical appliances and is directed upon
material things. The disrepute which has attended the thought
of material things in comparison with immaterial thought has
been transferred to everything associated with practice.

One might continue in this strain. The natural history of
conceptions about work and the arts if it were traced through
a succession of peoples and cultures would be instructive. But
all that is needed for our purpose is to raise the question: Why
this invidious discrimination? A very little reflection shows that
the suggestions which have been offered by way of explanation
themselves need to be explained. Ideas derived from social
castes and emotional revulsions are hardly reasons to be offered
in justification of a belief, although they may have a bearing
on its causation. Contempt for matter and bodies and glorifica-
tion of the immaterial are affairs which are not self-explana-
tory. And, as we shall be at some pains to show later in the
discussion, the idea which connects thinking and knowing with
some principle or force that is wholly separate from connection
with physical things will not stand examination, especially since
tht whole-hearted adoption of experimental method in the
natural sciences.

The questions suggested have far-reaching issues. What is
the cause and the import of the sharp division between theory
and practice? Why should the latter be disesteemed along with
matter and the body? What has been the effect upon the

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

various modes in which action is manifested: industry, politics,
the fine arts, and upon morals conceived of as overt activity
having consequences, instead of as mere inner personal atti-
tude? How has the separation of intellect from action affected
the theory of knowledge? What has been in particular the
effect upon the conception and course of philosophy? What
forces are at work to break down the division? What would the
effect be if the divorce were annulled, and knowing and doing
were brought into intrinsic connection with one another? What
revisions of the traditional theory of mind, thought and know-
ing would be required, and what change in the idea of the office
of philosophy would be demanded? What modifications would
ensue in the disciplines which are concerned with the various
phases of human activity?

These questions form the theme of this book, and indicate
the nature of the problems to be discussed. In this opening
chapter we shall consider especially some historic grounds for
the elevation of knowledge above making and doing. This
phase of the discussion will disclose that exaltation of pure
intellect and its activity above practical affairs is fundamentally
connected with the quest for a certainty which shall be abso-
lute and unshakeable. The distinctive characteristic of practical
activity, one which is so inherent that it cannot be eliminated, is
the uncertainty which attends it. Of it we are compelled to say:
Act, but act at your peril. Judgment and belief regarding
actions to be performed can never attain more than a pre-
carious probability. Through thought, however, it has seemed
that men might escape from the perils of uncertainty.

Practical activity deals with individualized and unique situ-
ations which are never exactly duplicable and about which,
accordingly, no complete assurance is possible. All activity,
moreover, involves change. The intellect, however, according
to the traditional doctrine, may grasp universal Being, and

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ESCAPE FROM PERIL

Being which is universal is fixed and immutable. Wherever
there is practical activity we human beings are involved as par-
takers in the issue. All the fear, disesteem and lack of confi-
dence which gather about the thought of ourselves, cluster also
about the thought of the actions in which we are partners.
Man's distrust of himself has caused him to desire to get
beyond and above himself} in pure knowledge he has thought
he could attain this self -transcendence.

There is no need to expatiate upon the risk which attends
overt action. The burden of proverbs and wise saws is that the
best laid plans of men as of mice gang agley. Fortune rather
than our own intent and act determines eventual success and
failure. The pathos of unfulfilled expectation, the tragedy of
defeated purpose and ideals, the catastrophes of accident, are
the commonplaces of all comment on the human scene. We
survey conditions, make the wisest choice we can; we act, and
we must trust the rest to fate, fortune or providence. Moralists
tell us to look to the end when we act and then inform us that
the end is always uncertain. Judging, planning, choice, no mat-
ter how thoroughly conducted, and action no matter how pru-
dently executed, never are the sole determinants of any out-
come. Alien and indifferent natural forces, unforeseeable
conditions enter in and have a decisive voice. The more impor-
tant the issue, the greater is their say as to the ulterior event.
Hence men have longed to find a realm in which there is
an activity which is not overt and which has no external conse-
quences. "Safety first" has played a large role in effecting a
preference for knowing over doing and making. With those to
whom the process of pure thinking is congenial and who have
the leisure and the aptitude to pursue their preference, the
happiness attending knowing is unalloyed; it is not entangled
in the risks which overt action cannot escape. Thought has been
alleged to be a purely inner activity, intrinsic to mind alone;

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

and according to traditional classic doctrine, "mind" is complete
and self-sufficient in itself. Overt action may follow upon its
operations but in an external way, a way not intrinsic to its
completion. Since rational activity is complete within itself it
needs no external manifestation. Failure and frustration are
attributed to the accidents of an alien, intractable and inferior
realm of existence. The outer lot of thought is cast in a world
external to it, but one which in no way injures the supremacy
and completeness of thought and knowledge in their intrinsic
natures.

Thus the arts by which man attains such practical security
as is possible of achievement are looked down upon. The
security they provide is relative, ever incomplete, at the risk of
untoward circumstance. The multiplication of arts may even
be bemoaned as a source of new dangers. Each of them de-
mands its own measures of protection. Each one in its opera-
tion brings with it new and unexpected consequences having
perils for which we are not prepared. The quest for certainty
is a quest for a peace which is assured, an object which is un-
qualified by risk and the shadow of fear which action casts.
For it is not uncertainty per se which men dislike, but the fact
that uncertainty involves us in peril of evils. Uncertainty that
affected only the detail of consequences to be experienced pro-
vided they had a warrant of being enjoyable would have no
sting. It would bring the zest of adventure and the spice of
variety. Quest for complete certainty can be fulfilled in pure
knowing alone. Such is the verdict of our most enduring philo-
sophic tradition.

While the tradition has, as we shall see later, found its way
into all themes and subjects, and determines the form of cur-
rent problems and conclusions regarding mind and knowledge,
it may be doubted whether if we were suddenly released from
the burden of tradition, we should, on the basis of present

8

ESCAPE FROM PERIL

experience take the disparaging view of practice and the exalted
view of knowledge apart from action which tradition dictates.
For man, in spite of the new perils in which the machinery of
his new arts of production and transportation have involved
him, has learned to play with sources of danger. He even seeks
them out, weary of the routine of a too sheltered life. The
enormous change taking place in the position of women is itself,
for example, a commentary on a change of attitude toward the
value of protection as an end in itself. We have attained, at
least subconsciously, a certain feeling of confidence; a feeling
that control of the main conditions of fortune is to an appre-
ciable degree passing into our own hands. We live surrounded
with the protection of thousands of arts and we have devised
schemes of insurance which mitigate and distribute the evils
which accrue. Barring the fears which war leaves in its train,
it is perhaps a safe speculation that if contemporary western
man were completely deprived of all the old beliefs about
knowledge and actions he would assume, with a fair degree of
confidence, that it lies within his power to achieve a reasonable
degree of security in life.

This suggestion is speculative. Acceptance of it is not needed
by the argument. It has its value as an indication of the earlier
conditions in which a felt need for assurance was the dominant
emotion. For primitive men had none of the elaborate arts of
protection and use which we now enjoy and no confidence in
his own powers when they were reinforced by appliances of art.
He lived under conditions in which he was extraordinarily
exposed to peril, and at the same time he was without the
means of defense which are to-day matters of course. Most of
our simplest tools and utensils did not exist; there was no
accurate foresight; men faced the forces of nature in a state
of nakedness which was more than physical; save under un-
usually benign conditions he was beset with dangers that knew

9

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

no remission. In consequence, mystery attended experiences of
good and evil} they could not be traced to their natural causes
and they seemed to be the dispensations, the gifts and the
inflictions, of powers beyond possibility of control. The pre-
carious crises of birth, puberty, illness, death, war, famine,
plague, the uncertainties of the hunt, the vicissitudes of climate
and the great seasonal changes, kept imagination occupied with
the uncertain. Any scene or object that was implicated in any
conspicuous tragedy or triumph, in no matter how accidental
a way, got a peculiar significance. It was seized upon as a
harbinger of good or as an omen of evil. Accordingly, some
things were cherished as means of encompassing safety just as
a good artisan to-day looks after his tools } others were feared
and shunned because of their potencies for harm.

As a drowning man is said to grasp at a straw, so men who
lacked the instruments and skills developed in later days,
snatched at whatever, by any stretch of imagination, could be
regarded as a source of help in time of trouble. The attention,
interest and care which now go to acquiring skill in the use
of appliances and to the invention of means for better service
of ends, were devoted to noting omens, making irrelevant
prognostications, performing ritualistic ceremonies and mani-
pulating objects possessed of magical power over natural
events. In such an atmosphere primitive religion was born and
fostered. Rather this atmosphere was the religious disposition.

Search for alliance with means which might promote pros-
perity and which would afford defense against hostile powers
was constant. While this attitude was most marked in connec-
tion with the recurrent crises of life, yet the boundary line
between these crucial affairs with their extraordinary risks and
everyday acts was shadowy. The acts that related to common-
place things and everyday occupations were usually accom-
panied, for good measure of security, by ritual acts. The mak-

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ESCAPE FROM PERIL

ing of a weapon, the molding of a bowl, the weaving of a
mat, the sowing of seed, the reaping of a harvest, required acts
different in kind to the technical skills employed. These other
acts had a special solemnity and were thought necessary in order
to ensure the success of the practical operations used.

While it is difficult to avoid the use of the word supernatu-
ral, we must avoid the meaning the word has for us. As long
as there was no defined area of the natural^ that which is over
and beyond the natural can have no significance. The distinc-
tion, as anthropological students have pointed out, was between
ordinary and extraordinary} between the prosaic, usual run of
events and the crucial incident or irruption which determined
the direction which the average and expected course of events
took. But the two realms were in no way sharply demarcated
from each other. There was a no-man's land, a vague territory,
in which they overlapped. At any moment the extraordinary
might invade the commonplace and either wreck it or clothe it
with some surprising glory. The use of ordinary things under
critical conditions was fraught with inexplicable potentialities
of good and evil.

The two dominant conceptions, cultural categories one
might call them, which grew and flourished under such circum-
stances were those of the holy and the fortunate, with their
opposites, the profane and the unlucky. As with the idea of the
supernatural, meanings are not to be assigned on the basis of
present usage. Everything which was charged with some ex-
traordinary potency for benefit or injury was holy; holiness
meant necessity for being approached with ceremonial scruples.
The holy thing, whether place, object, person or ritual appli-
ance, has its sinister facej "to be handled with care" is written
upon it. From it there issues the command: Noli me longer e.
Tabus, a whole set of prohibitions and injunctions, gather about
it. It is capable of transmitting its mysterious potency to other

II

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

things. To secure the favor of the holy is to be on the road to
success, while any conspicuous success is proof of the favor of
some overshadowing power a fact which politicians of all
ages have known how to utilize. Because of its surcharge of
power, ambivalent in quality, the holy has to be approached
not only with scruples but in an attitude of subjection. There
are rites of purification, humiliation, fasting and prayer which
are preconditions of securing its favor.

The holy is the bearer of blessing or fortune. But a differ-
ence early developed between the ideas of the holy and the
lucky, because of the different dispositions in which each was
to be approached. A lucky object is something to be used. It is
to be manipulated rather than approached with awe. It calls
for incantations, spells, divinations rather than for supplication
and humiliation. Moreover, the lucky thing tends to be a
concrete and tangible object, while the holy one is not usually
definitely localized} it is the more potent in the degree in
which its habitation and form are vague. The lucky object is
subject to pressure, at a pinch to coercion, to scolding and
punishment. It might be discarded if it failed to bring luck.
There developed a certain element of mastery in its use, in
distinction from the dependence and subjection which remained
the proper attitude toward the holy. Thus there was a kind of
rhythm of domination and submission, of imprecation and sup-
plication, of utilization and communion.

Such statements give, of course, a one-sided picture. Men at
all times have gone about many things in a matter-of-fact way
and have had their daily enjoyments. Even in the ceremonies
of which we have spoken there entered the ordinary love of
the dramatic as well as the desire for repetition, once routine
is established. Primitive man early developed some tools and
some modes of skill. With them went prosaic knowledge of
the properties of ordinary things. But these beliefs were sur-

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ESCAPE FROM PERIL

rounded by others of an imaginative and emotional type, and
were more or less submerged in the latter. Moreover, prestige
attached to the latter. Just because some beliefs were matter-
of-fact they did not have the weight and authority that belong
to those about the extraordinary and unaccountable. We find
the same phenomenon repeated to-day 'wherever religious
beliefs have marked vitality.

Prosaic beliefs about verifiable facts, beliefs backed up by
evidence of the senses and by useful fruits, had little glamour
and prestige compared with the vogue of objects of rite and
ceremony. Hence the things forming their subject-matter were
felt to be lower in rank. Familiarity breeds a sense of equality
if not of contempt. We deem ourselves on a par with things we
daily administer. It is a truism to say that objects regarded
with awe have perforce a superior status. Herein is the source
of the fundamental dualism of human attention and regard.
The distinction between the two attitudes of everyday control
and dependence on something superior was finally generalized
intellectually. It took effect in the conception of two distinct
realms. The inferior was that in which man could foresee and
in which he had instruments and arts by which he might expect
a reasonable degree of control. The superior was that of occur-
rences so uncontrollable that they testified to the presence and
operation of powers beyond the scope of everyday and mun-
dane things.

The philosophical tradition regarding knowledge and prac-
tice, the immaterial or spiritual and the material, was not
original and primitive. It had for its background the state of
culture which has been sketched. It developed in a social at-
mosphere in which the division of the ordinary and extraor-
dinary was domesticated. Philosophy reflected upon it and gave
it a rational formulation and justification. The bodies of in-
formation that corresponded to the everyday arts, the store of

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

matter-of-fact knowledge, were things men knew because of
what they did. They were products and promises of utilities.
They shared in the relatively low esteem belonging to such
things in comparison with the extraordinary and divine.
Philosophy inherited the realm with which religion had been
concerned. Its mode of knowing was different from that accom-
panying the empirical arts, just because it dealt with a realm
of higher Being. It breathed an air purer than that in which
exist the making and doing that relate to livelihood, just as
the activities which took the form of rites and ceremonies were
nobler and nearer the divine than those spent in toil.

The change from religion to philosophy was so great in
form that their identity as to content is easily lost from view.
The form ceases to be that of the story told in imaginative and
emotional style, and becomes that of rational discourse observ-
ing the canons of logic. It is well known that that portion of
Aristotle's system which later generations have called meta-
physics he called First Philosophy. It is possible to quote from
him sentences descriptive of "First Philosophy" which make it
seem that the philosophic enterprise is a coldly rational one,
objective and analytic. Thus he says it is the most comprehen-
sive of all branches of knowledge because it has for its subject-
matter definition of the traits which belong to all forms of
Being whatsoever, however much they may differ from one
another in detail.

But when these passages are placed in the context they had
in Aristotle's own mind, it is clear that the comprehensiveness
and universality of first philosophy are not of a strictly analytic
sort. They mark a distinction with respect to grade of value and
title to reverence. For he explicitly identifies his first philosophy
or metaphysics with theology} he says it is higher than
other sciences. For these deal with generation and production,
while its subject-matter permits of demonstrative, that is neces-

ESCAPE FROM PERIL

sary, truth; and its objects are divine and such as are meet for
God to occupy himself with. Again, he says that the objects
of philosophy are such as are the causes of as much of the
divine as is manifest to us, and that if the divine is anywhere
present, it is present in things of the sort with which philosophy
deals. The supremacy of worth and dignity of these objects
are also made clear in the statement that the Being with which
philosophy is occupied is primary, eternal and self-sufficient,
because its nature is the Good, so that the Good is among the
first principles which are philosophy's subject-matter: yet
not, it must be understood, the good in the sense in which it
has meaning and standing in human life but the inherently and
eternally perfect, that which is complete and self-sufficient.

Aristotle tells us that from remote antiquity tradition has
handed down the idea, in story form, that the heavenly bodies
are gods, and that the divine encompasses the entire natural
world. This core of truth, he goes on to say in effect, was em-
broidered with myths for the benefit of the masses, for reasons
of expediency, namely, the preservation of social institutions.
The negative work of philosophy was then to strip away these
imaginative accretions. From the standpoint of popular belief
this was its chief work, and it was a destructive one. The masses
only felt that their religion was attacked. But the enduring
contribution was positive. The belief that the divine encom-
passes the world was detached from its mythical context and
made the basis of philosophy, and it became also the foundation
of physical science as is suggested by the remark that the
heavenly bodies are gods. Telling the story of the universe in
the form of rational discourse instead of emotionalized imag-
ination signified the discovery of logic as a rational science.
Conformity on the part of supreme reality to the requirements
of logic conferred upon its constitutive objects necessary and
immutable characteristics. Pure contemplation of these forms

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

was man's highest and most divine bliss, a communion with un-
changeable truth.

The geometry of Euclid doubtless gave the clew to logic
as the instrument of translation of what was sound in opinion
into the forms of rational discourse. Geometry seemed to reveal
the possibility of a science which owed nothing to observation
and sense beyond mere exemplification in figures or diagrams.
It seemed to disclose a world of ideal (or non-sensible) forms
which were connected with one another by eternal and necessary
relations which reason alone could trace. This discovery was
generalized by philosophy into the doctrine of a realm of fixed
Being which, when grasped by thought, formed a complete
system of immutable and necessary truth.

If one looks at the foundations of the philosophies of Plato
and Aristotle as an anthropologist looks at his material, that
is, as cultural subject-matter, it is clear that these philosophies
were systematizations in rational form of the content of Greek
religious and artistic beliefs. The systematization involved a
purification. Logic provided the patterns to which ultimately
real objects had to conform, while physical science was pos-
sible in the degree in which the natural world, even in its muta-
bilities, exhibited exemplification of ultimate immutable ra-
tional objects. Thus, along with the elimination of myths and
grosser superstitions, there were set up the ideals of science and
of a life of reason. Ends which could justify themselves to
reason were to take the place of custom as the guide of conduct.
These two ideals form a permanent contribution to western
civilization.

But with all our gratitude for these enduring gifts, we
cannot forget the conditions which attended them. For they
brought with them the idea of a higher realm of fixed reality
of which alone true science is possible and of an inferior world
of changing things with which experience and practical matters

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ESCAPE FROM PERIL

are concerned. They glorified the invariant at the expense of
change, it being evident that all practical activity falls within
the realm of change. It bequeathed the notion, which has ruled
philosophy ever since the time of the Greeks, that the office of
knowledge is to uncover the antecedently real, rather than, as
is the case with our practical judgments, to gain the kind of
understanding which is necessary to deal with problems as they
arise.

In fixing this conception of knowledge it established also,
as far as philosophies of the classic type are concerned, the
special task of philosophic inquiry. As a form of knowledge it
is concerned with the disclosure of the Real in itself, of Being
in and of itself. It is differentiated from other modes of know-
ing by its preoccupation with a higher and more ultimate form
of Being than that with which the sciences of nature are con-
cerned. As far as it occupied itself at all with human conduct, it
was to superimpose upon acts ends said to flow from the nature
of reason. It thus diverted thought from inquiring into the pur-
poses which experience of actual conditions suggest and from
concrete means of their actualization. It translated into a ra-
tional form the doctrine of escape from the vicissitudes of
existence by means of measures which do not demand an active
coping with conditions. For deliverance by means of rites and
cults, it substituted deliverance through reason. This deliver-
ance was an intellectual, a theoretical affair, constituted by a
knowledge to be attained apart from practical activity.

The realms of knowledge and action were each divided into
two regions. It is not to be inferred that Greek philosophy
separated activity from knowing. It connected them. But it
distinguished activity from action that is, from making and
doing. Rational and necessary knowledge was treated, as in
the celebrations of it by Aristotle, as an ultimate, self-sufficient
and self-enclosed form of self-originated and self-conducted

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

activity. It was ideal and eternal, independent of change and
hence of the world in which men act and live, the world we
experience perceptibly and practically. "Pure activity" was
sharply marked off from practical action. The latter, whether
in the industrial or the fine arts, in morals or in politics, was
concerned with an inferior region of Being in which change
rules, and which accordingly has Being only by courtesy, for
it manifests deficiency of sure footing in Being by the very fact
of change. It is infected with non-being.

On the side of knowledge, the division carried with it a
difference between knowledge, in its full sense, and belief. The
former is demonstrative, necessary that is, sure. Belief on the
contrary is only opinion j in its uncertainty and mere probabil-
ity, it relates to the world of change as knowledge corre-
sponds to the realm of true reality. This fact brings the discus-
sion around once more to our special theme as far as it affects
the conception of the office and nature of philosophy. That man
has two modes, two dimensions, of belief, cannot be doubted.
He has beliefs about actual existences and the course of events,
and he has beliefs about ends to be striven for, policies to be
adopted, goods to be attained and evils to be averted. The most
urgent of all practical problems concerns the connection the
subject-matter of these two kinds of beliefs sustain to each
other. How shall our most authentic and dependable cognitive
beliefs be used to regulate our practical beliefs? How shall the
latter serve to organize and integrate our intellectual beliefs?

There is a genuine possibility that the true problem of
philosophy is connected with precisely this type of question.
Man has beliefs which scientific inquiry vouchsafes, beliefs
about the actual structure and processes of things j and he also
has beliefs about the values which should regulate his conduct.
The question of how these two ways of believing may most
effectively and fruitfully interact with one another is the most

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general and significant of all the problems which life presents
to us. Some reasoned discipline, one obviously other than any
science, should deal with this issue. Thus there is supplied one
way of conceiving of the function of philosophy. But from this
mode of defining philosophy we are estopped by the chief
philosophical tradition. For according to it the realms of knowl-
edge and of practical action have no inherent connection with
each other. Here then is the focus to which the various elements
in our discussion converge. We may then profitably recapitu-
late. The realm of the practical is the region of change, and
change is always contingent} it has in it an element of chance
that cannot be eliminated. If a thing changes, its alteration
is convincing evidence of its lack of true or complete Being.
What is, in the full and pregnant sense of the world, is always,
eternally. It is self-contradictory for that which is to alter. If
it had no defect or imperfection in it how could it change?
That which becomes merely comes to be, never truly is. It is
infected with non-being j with privation of Being in the perfect
sense. The world of generation is the world of decay and de-
struction. Wherever one thing comes into being something else
passes out of being.

Thus the depreciation of practice was given a philosophic,
an ontological, justification. Practical action, as distinct from
self-revolving rational self-activity, belongs in the realm of
generation and decay, a realm inferior in value as in Being.
In form, the quest for absolute certainty has reached its goal.
Because ultimate Being or reality is fixed, permanent, admit-
ting of no change or variation, it may be grasped by rational
intuition and set forth in rational, that is, universal and neces-
sary, demonstration. I do not doubt that there was a feeling
before the rise of philosophy that the unalterably fixed and the
absolutely certain are one, or that change is the source from
which comes all our uncertainties and woes. But in philosophy

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

this inchoate feeling was definitely fornrilated. It was asserted
on grounds held to be as demonstrably necessary as are the
conclusions of geometry and logic. Thus the predisposition of
philosophy toward the universal, invariant and eternal was
fixed. It remains the common possession of the entire classic
philosophic tradition.

All parts of the scheme hang together. True Being or
Reality is complete j in being complete, it is perfect, divine,
immutable, the "unmoved mover." Then there are things that
change, that come and go, that are generated and perish, be-
cause of lack of the stability which participation in ultimate
Being alone confers. These changes, however, have form and
character and are knowable in the degree in which they tend
toward an end which is the fulfillment and completion of the
changes in question. Their instability is not absolute but is
marked by aspiration toward a goal.

The perfect and complete is rational thought, the ultimate
"end" or terminus of all natural movement. That which
changes, which becomes and passes away, is material j change
defines the physical. At most and best, it is a potentiality of
reaching a stable and fixed end. To these two realms belong two
sorts of knowledge. One of them is alone knowledge in the
full sense, science. This has a rational, necessary and unchang-
ing form. It is certain. The other, dealing with change, is
belief or opinion j empirical and particular j it is contingent, a
matter of probability, not of certainty. The most it can assert
is that things are so and so "upon the whole," usually. Corre-
sponding to the division in Being and in knowledge is that in
activities. Pure activity is rational j it is theoretical, in the sense
in which theory is apart from practical action. Then there is
action in doing and making, occupied with the needs and defects
of the lower realm of change in which, in his physical nature,
man is implicated.

20

ESCAPE FROM PERIL

Although this Greek formulation was made long ago and
much of it is now strange in its specific terms, certain features
of it are as relevant to present thought as they were significant
in their original formulation. For in spite of the great, the
enormous changes in the subject-matter and method of the
sciences and the tremendous expansion of practical activities by
means of arts and technologies, the main tradition of western
culture has retained intact this framework of ideas. Perfect
certainty is what man wants. It cannot be found by practical
doing or making j these take effect in an uncertain future, and
involve peril, the risk of misadventure, frustration and failure.
Knowledge, on the other hand, is thought to be concerned with
a region of being which is fixed in itself. Being eternal and
unalterable, human knowing is not to make any difference in
it. It can be approached through the medium of the appre-
hensions and demonstrations of thought, or by some other
organ of mind, which does nothing to the real, except just to
know it.

There is involved in these doctrines a whole system of
philosophical conclusions. The first and foremost is that there
is complete correspondence between knowledge in its true
meaning and what is real. What is known, what is true for
cognition, is what is real in being. The objects of knowledge
form the standards of measures of the reality of all other
objects of experience. Are the objects of the affections, of
desire, effort, choice, that is to say everything to which we at-
tach value, real? Yes, if they can be warranted by knowledge j if
we can know objects having these value properties, we are justi-
fied in thinking them real. But as objects of desire and purpose
they have no sure place in Being until they are approached and
validated through knowledge. The idea is so familiar that we
overlook the unexpressed premise upon which it rests, namely
that only the completely fixed and unchanging can be real.

21

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

The quest for certitude has determined our basic metaphysics.

Secondly, the theory of knowledge has its basic premises
fixed by the same doctrine. For knowledge to be certain must
relate to that which has antecedent existence or essential being.
There are certain things which are alone inherently the proper
objects of knowledge and science. Things in the production of
which we participate we cannot know in the true sense of the
word, for such things succeed instead of preceding our action.
What concerns action forms the realm of mere guesswork and
probability, as distinct from the warrant of rational assurance
which is the ideal of true knowledge. We are so accustomed to
the separation of knowledge from doing and making that we
fail to recognize how it controls our conceptions of mind, of
consciousness and of reflective inquiry. For as relates to genuine
knowledge, these must all be defined, on the basis of the
premise, so as not to admit of the presence of any overt action
that modifies conditions having prior and independent
existence.

Special theories of knowledge differ enormously from one
another. Their quarrels with one another fill the air. The din
thus created makes us deaf to the way in which they say one
thing in common. The controversies are familiar. Some theories
ascribe the ultimate test of knowledge to impressions passively
received, forced upon us whether we will or no. Others ascribe
the guarantee of knowledge to synthetic activity of the intellect.
Idealistic theories hold that mind and the object known are
ultimately onej realistic doctrines reduce knowledge to aware-
ness of what exists independently, and so on. But they all make
one common assumption. They all hold that the operation of
inquiry excludes any element of practical activity that enters
into the construction of the object known. Strangely enough
this is as true of idealism as of realism, of theories of synthetic
activity as of those of passive receptivity. For according to them

22

ESCAPE FROM PERIL

"mind" constructs the known object not in any observable way,
or by means of practical overt acts having a temporal quality,
but by some occult internal operation.

The common essence of all these theories, in short L is that
what is known is antecedent to the mental act of observation
and inquiry, and is totally unaffected by these actsj otherwise it
would not be fixed and unchangeable. This negative condition,
that the processes of search, investigation, reflection, involved
in knowledge relate to something having prior being, fixes once
for all the main characters attributed to mind, and to the organs
of knowing. They must be outside what is known, so as not to
interact in any way with the object to be known. If the word
"interaction" be used, it cannot denote that overt production of
change it signifies in its ordinary and practical use.

The theory of knowing is modeled after what was sup-
posed to take place in the act of vision. The object refracts
light to the eye and is seenj it makes a difference to the eye and
to the person having an optical apparatus, but none to the thing
seen. The real object is the object so fixed in its regal aloofness
that it is a king to any beholding mind that may gaze upon it.
A spectator theory of knowledge is the inevitable outcome.
There have been theories which hold that mental activity inter-
venes, but they have retained the old premise. They have there-
fore concluded that it is impossible to know reality. Since mind
intervenes, we know, according to them, only some modified
semblance of the real object, some "appearance." It would be
hard to find a more thoroughgoing confirmation than this con-
clusion provides of the complete hold possessed by the belief
that the object of knowledge is a reality fixed and complete in
itself, in isolation from an act of inquiry which has in it any
element of production of change.

All of these notions about certainty and the fixed, about
the nature of the real world, about the nature of the mind and

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

its organs of knowing, are completely bound up with one an-
other, and their consequences ramify into practically all im-
portant ideas entertained upon any philosophic question. They
all flow such is my basic thesis from the separation (set up
in the interest of the quest for absolute certainty) between
theory and practice, knowledge and actions. Consequently the
later problem cannot be attacked in isolation, by itself. It is too
thoroughly entangled with fundamental beliefs and ideas in
all sorts of fields.

In later chapters the theme will, therefore, be approached
in relation to each of the above-mentioned points. We shall first
take up the effect of the traditional separation upon the concep-
tion of the nature of philosophy, especially in connection with
the question of the secure place of values in existence. We shall
then pass on to an account of the way in which modern philoso-
phies have been dominated by the problem of reconciling the
conclusions of natural science with the objective validity of the
values by which men live and regulate their conduct: a prob-
lem which would have no existence were it not for the prior
uncritical acceptance of the traditional notion that knowledge
has a monopolistic claim to access to reality. The discussion will
then take up various phases of the development of actual know-
ing as exemplified in scientific procedure, so as to show, by an
analysis of experimental inquiry in its various phases, how com-
pletely the traditional assumptions, mentioned above, have been
abandoned in concrete scientific procedure. For science in be-
coming experimental has itself become a mode of directed
practical doing. There will then follow a brief statement of the
effect of the destruction of the barriers which have divided
theory and practice upon reconstruction of the basic ideas about
mind and thought, and upon the solution of a number of
long-standing problems as to the theory of knowledge. The
consequences of substituting search for security by practical

24

ESCAPE FROM PERIL

means for quest of absolute certainty by cognitive means will
then be considered in its bearing upon the problem of our judg-
ments regarding the values which control conduct, especially its
social phases.

CHAPTER II

PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE
IMMUTABLE

IN THE PREVIOUS chapter, we noted incidentally the distinction
made in the classic tradition between knowledge and belief, or,
as Locke put it, between knowledge and judgment. According
to this distinction the certain and knowledge are co-extensive.
Disputes exist, but they are whether sensation or reason affords
the basis of certainty j or whether existence or essence is its
object. In contrast with this identification, the very word
"belief" is eloquent on the topic of certainty. We believe in the
absence of knowledge or complete assurance. Hence the quest
for certainty has always been an effort to transcend belief. Now
since, as we have already noted, all matters of practical action
involve an element of uncertainty, we can ascend from belief
to knowledge only by isolating the latter from practical doing
and making.

In this chapter we are especially concerned with the effect
of the ideal of certainty as something superior to belief upon
the conception of the nature and function of philosophy. Greek
thinkers saw clearly and logically that experience cannot
furnish us, as respects cognition of existence, with anything
more than contingent probability. Experience cannot deliver to
us necessary truths j truths completely demonstrated by reason.
Its conclusions are particular, not universal. Not being "exact"
they come short of "science." Thus there arose the distinction
between rational truths or, in modern terminology, truths re-
lating to the relation of ideas, and "truths" about matters of

26

PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR IMMUTABLE

existence, empirically ascertained. Thus not merely the arts of
practice, industrial and social, were stamped matters of belief
rather than of knowledge, but also all those sciences which are
matters of inductive inference from observation.

One might indulge in the reflection that they are none the
worse for all that, especially since the natural sciences have
developed a technique for achieving a high degree of probabil-
ity and for measuring, within assignable limits, the amount of
probability which attaches in particular cases to conclusions.
But historically the matter is not so simple as to permit of this
retort. For empirical or observational sciences were placed in
invidious contrast to rational sciences which dealt with eternal
and universal objects and which therefore were possessed of
necessary truth. Consequently all observational sciences as far
as their material could not be subsumed under forms and prin-
ciples supplied by rational science shared in the depreciatory
view held about practical affairs. They are relatively low,
secular and profane compared with the perfect realities of ra-
tional science.

And here is a justification for going back to something as
remote in time as Greek philosophy. The whole classic tradi-
tion down to our day has continued to hold a slighting view of
experience as such, and to hold up as the proper goal and ideal
of true knowledge realities which even if they are located in
empirical things cannot be known by experimental methods.
The logical consequence for philosophy itself is evident. Upon
the side of method, it has been compelled to claim for itself the
possession of a method issuing from reason itself, and having
the warrant of reason, independently of experience. As long as
the view obtained that nature itself is truly known by the same
rational method, the consequences at least those which were
evident were not serious. There was no break between
philosophy and genuine science or what was conceived to be

27

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

such. In fact, there was not even a distinction j there were
simply various branches of philosophy, metaphysical, logical,
natural, moral, etc., in a descending scale of demonstrative cer-
tainty. Since, according to the theory, the subject-matter of the
lower sciences was inherently of a different character from that
of true knowledge, there was no ground for rational dissatis-
faction with the lower degree of knowledge called belief. In-
ferior knowledge or belief corresponded to the inferior state
of subject-matter.

The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century effected
a great modification. Science itself through the aid of mathe-
matics carried the scheme of demonstrative knowledge over to
natural objects. The "laws" of the natural world had that
fixed character which in the older scheme had belonged only to
rational and ideal forms. A mathematical science of nature
couched in mechanistic terms claimed to be the only sound
natural philosophy. Hence the older philosophies lost alliance
with natural knowledge and the support that had been given
to philosophy by them. Philosophy in maintaining its claim to
be a superior form of knowledge was compelled to take an
invidious and so to say malicious attitude toward the conclusions
of natural science. The framework of the old tradition had in
the meantime become embedded in Christian theology, and
through religious teaching was made a part of the inherited cul-
ture of those innocent of any technical philosophy. Conse-
quently, the rivalry between philosophy and the new science,
with respect to the claim to know reality, was converted in effect
into a rivalry between the spiritual values guaranteed by the
older philosophic tradition and the conclusions of natural
knowledge. The more science advanced the more it seemed to
encroach upon the special province of the territory over which
philosophy had claimed jurisdiction. Thus philosophy in its
classic form became a species of apologetic justification for

28

PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR IMMUTABLE

belief in an ultimate reality in which the values which
should regulate life and control conduct are securely
enstated.

There are undoubted disadvantages in the historic man-
ner of approach to the problem which has been followed*
It may readily be thought either that the Greek formulation
which has been emphasized has no especial pertinency with
respect to modern thought and especially to contemporary
philosophy j or that no philosophical statement is of any great
importance for the mass of non-philosophic persons. Those
interested in philosophy may object that the criticisms passed
are directed if not at a man of straw at least to positions that
have long since lost their actuality. Those not friendly to any
form of philosophy may inquire what import they have for any
except professed philosophers.

The first type of objection will be dealt with somewhat in
extenso in the succeeding chapter, in which I shall try to show
how modern philosophies, in spite of their great diversity, have
been concerned with problems of adjustment of the conclusions
of modern science to the chief religious and moral tradition of
the western world j together with the way in which these prob-
lems are connected with retention of the conception of the
relation of knowledge to reality formulated in Greek thought.
At the point in the discussion now reached, it suffices to point
out that, in spite of great changes in detail, the notion of a
separation between knowledge and action, theory and practice,
has been perpetuated, and that the beliefs connected with action
are taken to be uncertain and inferior to value compared with
those inherently connected with objects of knowledge, so that
the former are securely established only as they derived from
the latter. Not the specific content of Greek thought is pertinent
to present problems, but its insistence that security is measured
by certainty of knowledge, while the latter is measured by

29

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

adhesion to fixed and immutable objects, which therefore are
independent of what men do in practical activity.

The other objection is of a different sort. It comes from
those who feel that not merely Greek philosophy but philoso-
phy in any form is remote from all significant human concern.
It is willing to admit or rather assert that it is presumptuous
for philosophy to lay claim to knowledge of a higher order
than that given by natural science, but it also holds that this is
no great matter in any case except for professional philosophers.

There would be force in this latter objection were it not
that those who make it hold for the most part the same
philosophy of certainty and its proper object that is held by
philosophers, save in an inchoate form. They are not interested
in the notion that philosophic thought is a special means of
attaining this object and the certainty it affords, but they are
far from holding, either explicitly or implicitly, that the arts
of intelligently directed action are the means by which security
of values are to be attained. With respect to certain ends and
goods they accept this idea. But in thinking of these ends and
values as material, as related to health, wealth, control of con-
ditions for the sake of an inferior order of consequences, they
retain the same division between a higher reality and a lower
that is formulated in classic philosophy. They may be innocent
of the vocabulary that speaks of reason, necessary truth, the
universal, things in themselves and appearances. But they
incline to believe that there is some other road than that of
action, directed by knowledge, to achieve ultimate security of
higher ideals and purposes. They think of practical action as
necessary for practical utilities, but they mark off practical
utilities from spiritual and ideal values. Philosophy did not
originate the underlying division. It only gave intellectual
formulation and justification to ideas that were operative in
men's minds generally. And the elements of these ideas are

30

PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR IMMUTABLE

as active in present culture as they ever were in the past. In-
deed, through the diffusion of religious doctrines, the idea
that ultimate values are a matter of special revelation and are
to be embodied in life by special means radically different from
the arts of action that deal with lower and lesser ends has been
accentuated in the popular mind.

Here is the point which is of general human import instead
of concern merely to professional philosophers. What about the
security of values, of the things which are admirable, honor-
able, to be approved of and striven for? It is probably in con-
sequence of the derogatory view held of practice that the
question of the secure place of values in human experience is
so seldom raised in connection with the problem of the relation
of knowledge and practice. But upon any view concerning the
status of action, the scope of the latter cannot be restricted to
self-seeking acts, nor to those of a prudential aspect, nor in
general to things of expediency and what are often termed
"utilitarian" affairs. The maintenance and diffusion of intellec-
tual values, of moral excellencies, the esthetically admirable, as
well as the maintenance of order and decorum in human rela-
tions are dependent upon what men do.

Whether because of the emphasis of traditional religion
upon salvation of the personal soul or for some other reason,
there is a tendency to restrict the ultimate scope of morals to
the reflex effect of conduct on one's self. Even utilitarianism,
with all its seeming independence of traditional theology and
its emphasis upon the general good as the criterion for judging
conduct, insisted in its hedonistic psychology upon private
pleasure as the motive for action. The idea that the stable and
expanding institution of all things that make life worth while
throughout all human relationships is the real object of all
intelligent conduct is depressed from view by the current con-
ception of morals as a special kind of action chiefly concerned

31

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

with either the virtues or the enjoyments of individuals in their
personal capacities. In changed form, we still retain the notion
of a division of activity into two kinds having very different
worths. The result is the depreciated meaning that has come
to be attached to the very meaning of the "practical" and the
useful. Instead of being extended to cover all forms of action
by means of which all the values of life are extended and ren-
dered more secure, including the diffusion of the fine arts and
the cultivation of taste, the processes of education and all ac-
tivities which are concerned with rendering human relationships
more significant and worthy, the meaning of "practical" is
limited to matters of ease, comfort, riches, bodily security and
police order, possibly health, etc., things which in their isola-
tion from other goods can only lay claim to restricted and
narrow value. In consequence, these subjects are handed over
to technical sciences and artsj they are no concern of "higher"
interests which feel that no matter what happens to inferior
goods in the vicissitudes of natural existence, the highest values
are immutable characters of the ultimately real.

Our depreciatory attitude toward "practice" would be
modified if we habitually thought of it in its most liberal sense,
and if we surrendered our customary dualism between two
separate kinds of value, one intrinsically higher and one in-
herently lower. We should regard practice as the only means
(other than accident) by which whatever is judged to be honor-
able, admirable, approvable can be kept in concrete experience-
able existence. In this connection the entire import of "morals"
would be transformed. How much of the tendency to ignore
permanent objective consequences in differences made in natu-
ral and social relations; and how much of the emphasis upon
personal and internal motives and dispositions irrespective of
what they objectively produce and sustain are products of the
habitual depreciation of the worth of action in comparison with

3*

PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR IMMUTABLE

forms of mental processes, of thought and sentiment, which
make no objective difference in things themselves?

It would be possible to argue (and, I think, with much
justice) that failure to make action central in the search for
such security as is humanly possible is a survival of the
impotency of men in those stages of civilization when he had
few means of regulating and utilizing the conditions upon
which the occurrence of consequences depend. As long as man
was unable by means of the arts of practice to direct the course
of events, it was natural for him to seek an emotional substi-
tute j in the absence of actual certainty in the midst of a pre-
carious and hazardous world, men cultivated all sorts of things
that would give them the feeling of certainty. And it is pos-
sible that, when not carried to an illusory point, the cultivation
of the feeling gave man courage and confidence and enabled
him to carry the burdens of life more successfully. But one
could hardly seriously contend that this fact, if it be such, is
one upon which to found a reasoned philosophy.

It is to the conception of philosophy that we come back.
No mode of action can, as we have insisted, give anything
approaching absolute certitude j it provides insurance but no
assurance. Doing is always subject to peril, to the danger of
frustration. When men began to reflect philosophically it
seemed to them altogether too risky to leave the place of
values at the mercy of acts the results of which are never sure.
This precariousness might hold as far as empirical existence,
existence in the sensible and phenomenal world, is concerned}
but this very uncertainty seemed to render it the more needful
that ideal goods should be shown to have, by means of knowl-
edge of the most assured type, an indefeasible and inex-
pugnable position in the realm of the ultimately real. So at
least we may imagine men to have reasoned. And to-day many
persons find a peculiar consolation in the face of the unstable

33

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

and dubious presence of values in actual, experience by project-
ing a perfect form of good into a realm of essence, if not into
a heaven beyond the earthly skies, wherein their authority, if
not their existence, is wholly unshakeable.

Instead of asking how far this process is of that compensa-
tory kind with which recent psychology has made us familiar,
we are inquiring into the effect upon philosophy. It will not be
denied, I suppose, that the chief aim of those philosophies
which I have called classical, has been to show that the realities
which are the objects of the highest and most necessary knowl-
edge are also endowed with the values which correspond to our
best aspirations, admirations and approvals. That, one may say,
is the very heart of all traditional philosophic idealisms. There
is a pathos, having its own nobility, in philosophies which think
it their proper office to give an intellectual or cognitive certifi-
cation to the ontological reality of the highest values. It is
difficult for men to see desire and choice set earnestly upon
the good and yet being frustrated, without their imagining a
realm in which the good has come completely to its own, and
is identified with a Reality in which resides all ultimate power.
The failure and frustration of actual life is then attributed
to the fact that this world is finite and phenomenal, sensible
rather than real, or to the weakness of our finite apprehension,
which cannot see that the discrepancy between existence and
value is merely seeming, and that a fuller vision would behold
partial evil an element in complete good. Thus the office of
philosophy is to project by dialectic, resting supposedly upon
self-evident premises, a realm in which the object of com-
pletest cognitive certitude is also one with the object of the
heart's best aspiration. The fusion of the good and the true
with unity and plenitude of Being thus becomes the goal of
classic philosophy.

The situation would strike us as a curious one were it not

34

PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR IMMUTABLE

so familiar. Practical activity is dismissed to a world of low
grade reality. Desire is found only where something is lacking
and hence its existence is a sign of imperfection of Being. Hence
one must go to passionless reason to find perfect reality and
complete certitude. But nevertheless the chief philosophic in-
terest is to prove that the essential properties of the reality
that is the object of pure knowledge are precisely those char-
acteristics which have meaning in connection with affection,
desire and choice. After degrading practical affairs in order
to exalt knowledge, the chief task of knowledge turns out to
be to demonstrate the absolutely assured and permanent reality
of the values with which practical activity is concerned! Can
we fail to see the irony in a situation wherein desire and emotion
are relegated to a position inferior in every way to that of
knowledge, while at the same time the chief problem of that
which is termed the highest and most perfect knowledge is
taken to be the existence of evil that is, of desires errant and
frustrated?

The contradiction involved, however, is much more than a
purely intellectual one which if purely theoretical would be
innocuously lacking in practical consequences. The thing which
concerns all of us as human beings is precisely the greatest
attainable security of values in concrete existence. The thought
that the values which are unstable and wavering in the world
in which we live are eternally secure in a higher realm (which
reason demonstrates but which we cannot experience), that all
the goods which are defeated here are triumphant there, may
give consolation to the depressed. But it does not change the
existential situation in the least. The separation that has been
instituted between theory and practice, with its consequent sub-
stitution of cognitive quest for absolute assurance for practical
endeavor to make the existence of good more secure in ex-
perience, has had the effect of distracting attention and divert-

35

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

ing energy from a task whose performance would yield definite
results.

The chief consideration in achieving concrete security of
values lies in the perfecting of methods of action. More ac-
tivity, blind striving, gets nothing forward. Regulation of con-
ditions upon which results depend is possible only by doing,
yet only by doing which has intelligent direction, which takes
cognizance of conditions, observes relations of sequence, and
which plans and executes in the light of this knowledge. The
notion that thought, apart from action, can warrant complete
certitude as to the status of supreme good, makes no contribu-
tion to the central problem of development of intelligent
methods of regulation. It rather depresses and deadens effort
in that direction. That is the chief indictment to be brought
against the classic philosophic tradition. Its import raises the
question of the relation which action sustains to knowledge in
fact, and whether the quest for certainty by other means than
those of intelligent action does not mark a baneful diversion
of thought from its proper office. It raises the question whether
mankind has not now achieved a sufficient degree of control
of methods of knowing and of the arts of practical action so
that a radical change in our conceptions of knowledge and
practice is rendered both possible and necessary.

That knowing, as judged from the actual procedures of
scientific inquiry, has completely abandoned in fact the tra-
ditional separation of knowing and doing, that the experi-
mental procedure is one that installs doing as the heart of
knowing, is a theme that will occupy our attention in later
chapters. What would happen to philosophy if it whole-
heartedly made a similar surrender? What would be its office
if it ceased to deal with the problem of reality and knowledge
at large? In effect, its function would be to facilitate the fruit-
fid interaction of our cognitive beliefs, our beliefs resting upon

36

PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR IMMUTABLE

the most dependable methods of iquiry, with our practical
beliefs about the values, the ends and purposes, that should
control human action in the things of large and liberal human
import.

Such a view renounces the traditional notion that action is
inherently inferior to knowledge and preference for the fixed
over the changing j it involves the conviction that security
attained by active control is to be more prized than certainty
in theory. But it does not imply that action is higher and better
than knowledge, and practice inherently superior to thought.
Constant and effective interaction of knowledge and practice
is something quite different from an exaltation of activity for
its own sake. Action, when directed by knowledge, is method
and means, not an end. The aim and end is the securer, freer
and more widely shared embodiment of values in experience by
means of that active control of objects which knowledge alone
makes possible.*

From this point of view, the problem of philosophy con-
cerns the interaction of our judgments about ends to be sought
with knowledge of the means for achieving them. Just as in
science the question of the advance of knowledge is the question
of what to do y what experiments to perform, what apparatus to
invent and use, what calculations to engage in, what branches of
mathematics to employ or to perfect, so the problem of practice
is what do we need to know, how shall we obtain that knowl-
edge and how shall we apply it?

It is an easy and altogether too common a habit to confuse
a personal division of labor with an isolation of function and
meaning. Human beings as individuals tend to devote them-

+ In reaction against the age-long depreciation of practice in behalf of
contemplative knowledge, there is a temptation simply to turn things upside
down. But the essence of pragmatic instrumentalism is to conceive of both
knowledge and practice as means of making goods excellencies of all kinds-
secure in experienced existence.

37

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

selves either to the practice of knowirg or to the practice of
a professional, business, social or esthetic art. Each takes the
other half of the circle for granted. Theorists and practitioners,
however, often indulge in unseemly wrangles as to the im-
portance of their respective tasks. Then the personal difference
of callings is hypostatized and made into an intrinsic differ-
ence between knowledge and practice.

If one looks at the history of knowledge, it is plain that at
the beginning men tried to know because they had to do so in
order to live. In the absence of that organic guidance given by
their structure to other animals, man had to find out what
he was about, and he could find out only by studying the
environment which constituted the means, obstacles and results
of his behavior. The desire for intellectual or cognitive under-
standing had no meaning except as a means of obtaining greater
security as to the issues of action. Moreover, even when after
the coming of leisure some men were enabled to adopt know-
ing as their special calling or profession, merely theoretical un-
certainty continues to have no meaning.

This statement will arouse protest. But the reaction against
the statement will turn out when examined to be due to the
fact that it is so difficult to find a case of purely intellectual
uncertainty, that is one upon which nothing hangs. Perhaps
as near to it as we can come is in the familiar story of the
Oriental potentate who declined to attend a horse race on the
ground that it was already well known to him that one horse
could run faster than another. His uncertainty as to which of
several horses could outspeed the others may be said to have
been purely intellectual. But also in the story nothing depended
from itj no curiosity was aroused j no effort was put forth to
satisfy the uncertainty. In other words, he did not carej it
made no difference. And it is a strict truism that no one would
care about any exclusively theoretical uncertainty or certainty.

38

PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR IMMUTABLE

For by definition in being exclusively theoretical it is one which
makes no difference anywhere.

Revulsion against this proposition is a tribute to the fact
that actually the intellectual and the practical are so closely
bound together. Hence when we imagine we are thinking o
an exclusively theoretical doubt, we smuggle in unconsciously
some consequence which hangs upon it. We think of uncertainty
arising in the course of an inquiry} in this case, uncertainty
until it is resolved blocks the progress of the inquiry a dis-
tinctly practical affair, since it involves conclusions and the
means of producing them. If we had no desires and no pur-
poses, then, as sheer truism, one state of things would be as
good as any other. Those who have set such store by the de-
monstration that Absolute Being already contains in eternal
safety within itself all values, have had as their interest the
fact that while the demonstration would make no difference
in the concrete existence of these values unless perhaps to
weaken effort to generate and sustain them it would make
a difference in their own personal attitudes in a feeling of
comfort or of release from responsibility, the consciousness of
a "moral holiday" in which some philosophers have found the
distinction between morals and religion.

Such considerations point to the conclusion that the ulti-
mate ground of the quest for cognitive certainty is the need for
security in the results of action. Men readily persuade them-
selves that they are devoted to intellectual certainty for its own
sake. Actually they want it because of its bearing on safeguard-
ing what they desire and esteem. The need for protection and
prosperity in action created the need for warranting the validity
of intellectual beliefs.

After a distinctively intellectual class had arisen, a class hav-
ing leisure and in a large degree protected against the more
serious perils which afflict the mass of humanity, its members

39

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

proceeded to glorify their own office. Since no amount of pains
and care in action can ensure complete certainty, certainty in
knowledge was worshipped as a substitute. In minor matters,
those that are relatively technical, professional, "utilitarian,"
men continued to resort to improving their methods of opera-
tion in order to be surer of results. But in affairs of momentous
value the requisite knowledge is hard to come by and the
bettering of methods is a slow process to be realized only by
the cooperative endeavor of many persons. The arts to be
formed and developed are social artsj an individual by himself
can do little to regulate the conditions which will render im-
portant values more secure, though with shrewdness and special
knowledge he can do much to further his own peculiar aims
given a fair share of luck. So because of impatience and be-
cause, as Aristotle was given to pointing out, an individual
is self-sufficient in that kind of thinking which involves no
action, the ideal of a cognitive certainty and truth having no
connection with practice, and prized because of its lack of con-
nection, developed. The doctrine worked out practically so as
to strengthen dependence upon authority and dogma in the
things of highest value, while increase of specialized knowl-
edge was relied upon in everyday, especially economic, affairs.
Just as belief that a magical ceremony will regulate the growth
of seeds to full harvest stifles the tendency to investigate
natural causes and their workings, so acceptance of dogmatic
rules as bases of conduct in education, morals and social mat-
ters, lessens the impetus to find out about the conditions which
are involved in forming intelligent plans.

It is more or less of a commonplace to speak of the crisis
which has been caused by the progress of the natural sciences
in the last few centuries. The crisis is due, it is asserted, to the
incompatibility between the conclusions of natural science about
the world in which we live and the realm of higher values,

40

PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR IMMUTABLE

of ideal and spiritual qualities, which get no support from nat-
ural science. The new science, it is said, has stripped the world
of the qualities which made it beautiful and congenial to menj
has deprived nature of all aspiration towards ends^ all prefer-
ence for accomplishing the good, and presented nature to us as
a scene of indifferent physical particles acting according to
mathematical and mechanical laws.

This effect of modern science has, it is notorious, set the
main problems for modern philosophy. How is science to be
accepted and yet the realm of values to be conserved? This
question forms the philosophic version of the popular conflict
of science and religion. Instead of being troubled about the
inconsistency of astronomy with the older religious beliefs
about heaven and the ascension of Christ, or the differences
between the geological record and the account of creation in
Genesis, philosophers have been troubled by the gap in kind
which exists between the fundamental principles of the natural
world and the reality of the values according to which mankind
is to regulate its life.

Philosophers, therefore, set to work to mediate, to find
some harmony behind the apparent discord. Everybody knows
that the trend of modern philosophy has been to arrive at
theories regarding the nature of the universe by means of
theories regarding the nature of knowledge a procedure
which reverses the apparently more judicious method of the
ancients in basing their conclusions about knowledge on the
nature of the universe in which knowledge occurs. The "crisis"
of which we have just been speaking accounts for the reversal.

Since science has made the trouble, the cure ought to be
found in an examination of the nature of knowledge, of the
conditions which make science possible. If the conditions of
the possibility of knowledge can be shown to be of an ideal
and rational character, then, so it has been thought, the loss

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

of an idealistic cosmology in physics can be readily borne. The
physical world can -be surrendered to matter and mechanism,
since we are assured that matter and mechanism have their
foundation in immaterial mind. Such has been the characteristic
course of modern spiritualistic philosophies since the time of
Kantj indeed, since that of Descartes, who first felt the poig-
nancy of the problem involved in reconciling the conclusions of
science with traditional religious and moral beliefs.

It would presumably be taken as a sign of extreme naivete,
if not of callous insensitiveness, if one were to ask why all this
ardor to reconcile the findings of natural science with the
validity of values? Why should any increase of knowledge
seem like a threat to what we prize, admire and approve? Why
should we not proceed to employ our gains in science to im-
prove our judgments about values, and to regulate our actions
so as to make values more secure and more widely shared in
existence?

I am willing to run the risk of charge of naivete for the
sake of making manifest the difference upon which we have
been dwelling. If men had associated their ideas about values
with practical activity instead of with cognition of antecedent
Being, they would not have been troubled by the findings of
science. They would have welcomed the latter. For anything
ascertained about the structure of actually existing conditions
would be a definite aid in making judgments about things to
be prized and striven for more adequate, and would instruct
us as to the means to be employed in realizing them. But ac-
cording to the religious and philosophic tradition of Europe,
the valid status of all the highest values, the good, true and
beautiful, was bound up with their being properties of ultimate
and supreme Being, namely, God. All went well as long as
what passed for natural science gave no offence to this concep-
tion. Trouble began when science ceased to disclose in the

42

PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR IMMUTABLE

objects of knowledge the possession of any such properties.
Then some roundabout method had to be devised for sub-
stantiating them.

The point of the seemingly crass question which was asked
is thus to elicit the radical difference made when the problem
of values is seen to be connected with the problem of intelli-
gent action. If the validity of beliefs and judgments about
values is dependent upon the consequences of action undertaken
in their behalf, if the assumed association of values with knowl-
edge capable of being demonstrated apart from activity, is
abandoned, then the problem of the intrinsic relation of science
to value is wholly artificial. It is replaced by a group of practi-
cal problems: How shall we employ what we know to direct
the formation of our beliefs about value and how shall we
direct our practical behavior so as to test these beliefs and
make possible better ones? The question is seen to be just
what it has always been empirically: What shall we do to make
objects having value more secure in existence? And we ap-
proach the answer to the problem with all the advantages
given us by increase of knowledge of the conditions and rela-
tions under which this doing must proceed.

But for over two thousand years the weight of the most
influential and authoritatively orthodox tradition of thought
has been thrown into the opposite scale. It has been devoted
to the problem of a purely cognitive certification (perhaps by
revelation, perhaps by intuition, perhaps by reason) of the
antecedent immutable reality of truth, beauty and goodness.
As against such a doctrine, the conclusions of natural science
constitute the materials of a serious problem. The appeal has
been made to the Court of Knowledge and the verdict has
been adverse. There are two rival systems that must have their
respective claims adjusted. The crisis in contemporary culture,
the confusions and conflicts in it, arise from a division of au-

43

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

thority. Scientific inquiry seems to tell one thing, and tra-
ditional beliefs about ends and ideals that have authority over
conduct tell us something quite different. The problem of re-
conciliation arises and persists for one reason only. As long as
the notions persist that knowledge is a disclosure of reality,
of reality prior to and independent of knowing, and that know-
ing is independent of a purpose to control the quality of ex-
perienced objects, the failure of natural science to disclose
significant values in its objects will come as a shock. Those
seriously concerned with the validity and authority of value
will have a problem on their hands. As long as the notion per-
sists that values are authentic and valid only on condition that
they are properties of Being independent of human action,
as long as it is supposed that their right to regulate action is
dependent upon their being independent of action, so long
there will be needed schemes to prove that values are, in
spite of the findings of science, genuine and known qualifica-
tions of reality in itself. For men will not easily surrender
all regulative guidance in action. If they are forbidden to find
standards in the course of experience they will seek them some-
where else, if not in revelation, then in the deliverance of a
reason that is above experience.

This then is the fundamental issue for present philosophy.
Is the doctrine justified that knowledge is valid in the degree
in which it is a revelation of antecedent existences or Being?
Is the doctrine justified that regulative ends and purposes have
validity only when they can be shown to be properties belong-
ing to things, whether as existences or as essences, apart from
human action? It is proposed to make another start. Desires,
affections, preferences, needs and interests at least exist in hu-
man experience j they are characteristics of it. Knowledge about
nature also exists. What does this knowledge imply and entail
with respect to the guidance of our ^motional and volitional

44

PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR IMMUTABLE

life? How shall the latter lay Hold of what is known in order
to make it of service?

These latter questions do not seem to many thinkers to
have the dignity that is attached to the traditional problems of
philosophy. They are proximate questions, not ultimate. They
do not concern Being and Knowledge "in themselves" and at
large, but the state of existence at specified times and places
and the state of affection, plans and purposes under concrete
circumstances. They are not concerned with framing a general
theory of reality, knowledge and value once for all, but with
finding how authentic beliefs about existence as they currently
exist can operate fruitfully and efficaciously in connection with
the practical problems that are urgent in actual life.

In restricted and technical fields, men now proceed un-
hesitatingly along these lines v In technology and the arts of
engineering and medicine, men do not think of operating in
any other way. Increased knowledge of nature and its con-
ditions does not raise the problem of validity of the value of
health or of communication in general, although it may well
make dubious the validity of certain conceptions men in the
past have entertained about the nature of health and com-
munication and the best ways of attaining these goods in fact.

In such matters, science has placed in our hands the means
by which we can better judge our wants, and has aided in form-
ing the instruments and operations by which to satisfy them.
That the same sort of thing has not happened in the moral
and distinctly humane arts is evident. Here is a problem whidi
might well trouble philosophers.

Why have not the arts which deal with the wider, more
generous, more distinctly humane values enjoyed the release
and expansion which have accrued to the technical arts? Can
it be seriously urged that it is because natural science has dis-
closed to us the kind of world which it has disclosed? It is

45

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

easy to see that these disclosures are hostile to some beliefs
about values which have been widely accepted, which have
prestige, which have become deeply impregnated with senti-
ment, and which authoritative institutions as well as the
emotion and inertia of men are slow to surrender. But this
admission, which practically enforces itself, is far from ex-
cluding the formation of new beliefs about things to be honored
and prized by men in their supreme loyalties of action. The
difficulty in the road is a practical one, a social one, connected
with institutions and the methods and aims of education, not
with science nor with value. Under such circumstances the first
problem for philosophy would seem to be to clear itself of
further responsibility for the doctrine that the supreme issue
is whether values have antecedent Being, while its further
office is to make clear the revisions and reconstructions that
have to be made in traditional judgments about values. Having
done this, it would be in a position to undertake^ the more
positive task of projecting ideas about values which might be
the basis of a new integration of human conduct.

We come back to the fact that the genuine issue is not
whether certain values, associated with traditions and institu-
tions, have Being already (whether that of existence or of
essence), but what concrete judgments we are to form about
ends and means in the regulation of practical behavior. The
emphasis which has been put upon the former question, the
creation of dogmas about the way in which values are already
real independently of what we do, dogmas which have ap-
pealed not in vain to philosophy for support, have naturally
bred, in the face of the changed character of science, confusion,
irresolution and numbness of will. If the men had been edu-
cated to think about broader humane values as they have now
learned to think about matters which fall within the scope of
technical arts, our whole present situation would be very dif-

PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR IMMUTABLE

ferent. The attention which has gone to achieving a purely
theoretical certainty with respect to them would have been
devoted to perfecting the arts by which they are to be judged
and striven for.

Indulge for a moment in an imaginative flight. Suppose
that men had been systematically educated in the belief that
the existence of values can cease to be accidental, narrow and
precarious only by human activity directed by the best available
knowledge. Suppose also men had been systematically educated
to believe that the important thing is not to get themselves
personally "right" in relation to the antecedent author and
guarantor of these values, but to form their judgments and
carry on their activity on the basis of public, objective and
shared consequences. Imagine these things and then imagine
what the present situation might be.

The suppositions are speculative. But they serve to indicate
the significance of the one point to which this chapter is de-
voted. The method and conclusions of science have without
doubt invaded many cherished beliefs about the things held
most dear. The resulting clash constitutes a genuine cultural
crisis. But it is a crisis in culture, a social crisis, historical and
temporal in character. It is not a problem in the adjustment of
properties of reality to one another. And yet modern philoso-
phy has chosen for the most part to treat it as a question of
how the realities assumed to be the object of science can have
the mathematical and mechanistic properties assigned to them
in natural science, while nevertheless the realm of ultimate
reality can be characterized by qualities termed ideal and
spiritual. The cultural problem is one of definite criticisms
to be made and of readjustments to be accomplished. Philoso-
phy which is willing to abandon its supposed task of knowing
ultimate reality and to devote itself to a proximate human
office might be of great help in such a task. It may be doubted

47

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

whether it can indefinitely pursue the task of trying to show
that the results of science when they are properly interpreted
do not mean what they seem to say, or of proving, by means
of an examination of possibilities and limits of knowledge, that
after all they rest upon a foundation congruous with traditional
beliefs about values.

Since the root of the traditional conception of philosophy
is the separation that has been made between knowledge and
action, between theory and practice, it is to the problem of this
separation that we are to give attention. Our main attempt
will be to show how the actual procedures of knowledge, in-
terpreted after the pattern formed by experimental inquiry,
cancel the isolation of knowledge from overt action. Before
engaging in this attempt, we shall in the next chapter show
the extent to which modern philosophy has been dominated
by effort to adjust to each other two systems of belief, one
relating to the objects of knowledge and the other to objects of
ideal value.

CHAPTER III
CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES

IT is THE theme of the present chapter that modern philoso-
phy, understanding by this term that which has been influenced
by the rise of the newer natural science, has contained within
itself an inner division. It has tried to combine acceptance
of the conclusions of scientific inquiry as to the natural world
with acceptance of doctrines about the nature of mind and
knowledge which originated before there was such a thing as
systematic experimental inquiry. Between the two there is an
inherent incompatibility. Hence the best efforts of philosophy
have been constantly frustrated by artificiality and by contro-
versial conflicts. Of all the many artificial problems which
philosophy has thereby inflicted upon itself, we are here con-
cerned with but one, the one with which the last chapter was
concerned in a general way. This is the supposed need of
reconciling, of somehow adjusting, the findings of scientific
knowledge with the validity of ideas concerning value.

For obvious reasons, Greek thought, from which stems
the philosophic conceptions about the nature of knowledge as
the sole valid grasp or vision of reality, did not have this
problem. Its physics were in complete harmony with its meta-
physics, and the latter were teleological and qualitative. Natural
objects themselves tend, throughout their changes, toward ideal
ends that are the final objects of highest knowledge. A science
of natural changes is possible only because of this fact. The
natural world is knowable in as far as its changes are dominated
by forms or essences that are immutable, complete or perfect.

49

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

In aspiring to actualize these prior and perfect forms, natural
phenomena present characters in virtue of which they may be
known, that is, defined and classified. Moreover, these ideal
forms form reason in its full and perfect actuality of Being.
To know them is to enjoy communion with perfect Being and
thus to enjoy the highest happiness. For man as a rational and
yet natural being strives also to realize his end, and this reali-
zation is identical with apprehension of true and immutable
Being. In this apprehension, man rises above the mutabilities
of the natural world and comes into possession of a perfection
which is incapable of lack and deprivation. Pure rationality is
in its purity above physical nature. But in his essential being,
his rationality, man is himself above nature. The reality which
satisfies the quest for cognitive certitude thus also affords the
unqualified possession of perfect good.

The need of adjustment of the results of knowledge and
the apprehension and enjoyment of the highest good came
when, in the seventeenth century, new methods of inquiry gave
an entirely new turn to the conceptions which could be enter-
tained about the natural world.

Very early in its history, modern science asserted that the
teleology of Greek science was a futile and mischievous en-
cumbrance, wholly mistaken in its idea of the goal and method
of scientific inquiry, and putting mind on the wrong track. It
repudiated the doctrine of ideal forms, rejecting them as
"occult." As the new scientific method progressed, it became
increasingly clear that the material of knowledge, provided one
took science as the model form of knowledge, gave no justifi-
cation for attributing to the objects of cognitive certainty
those perfections which in Greek science had been their essential
properties. At the same time, there was no disposition to break
away from the tradition according to which the valid status
of values must be determined by knowledge. Hence the crucial

50

CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES

problem which modern philosophy found forced upon it, in as
far as it accepted the conclusions of the new science while it
also retained three significant elements of ancient thought: the
first, that certainty, security, can be found only in the fixed
and unchanging} the second, that knowledge is the only road
to that which is intrinsically stable and certain} the third, that
practical activity is an inferior sort of thing, necessary simply
because of man's animal nature and the necessity for winning
subsistence from the environment.

In one significant respect, moreover, modern thought
started with accentuation of the gulf between the values which
are intrinsic to the real and hence are not dependent upon
action, and those goods which, being merely instrumental, are
the objects of practical activity. For Greek thought never made
a sharp separation between the rational and perfect realm and
the natural world. The latter was indeed inferior and infected
with non-being or privation. But it did not stand in any sharp
dualism to the higher and perfect reality. Greek thinking ac-
cepted the senses, the body and nature with natural piety and
found in nature a hierarchy of forms leading degree by de-
gree to the divine. The soul was the realized actuality of the
body, as reason was the transcendent realization of the intima-
tion of ideal forms contained in the soul. The senses included
within themselves forms which needed only to be stripped of
their material accretions to be true stepping stones to higher
knowledge.

Modern philosophy inherited the framework of Greek
ideas about the nature of knowledge although rejecting its
conclusions about natural objects. But it inherited them through
the medium of Hebraic and Christian religion. The natural
world in this tradition was fallen and corrupt. With che Greeks
the element of rationality was supreme and the good came
into human possession by the realized development of reason.

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

The intervening religious development made the ethical more
fundamental than the rational. The most significant issues con-
cerned the relation of will, rather than intellect, to supreme
and perfect Being. Thus there was effected a reversal of per-
spective as to the relations in perfect Being of the properties
in virtue of which it is respectively an object of true knowledge
and of perfect good and bliss. Righteousness, in accordance
with the Hebraic factors adopted into Christian theology, was
primary, and strictly intellectual properties were subordinate.
The participation of the mind in perfect being could not be
attained by intellect until the intellect was itself morally re-
deemed and purified. The difference between the pure Greek
tradition and the Christian is brought out in some words of
Cardinal Newman. "The Church holds that it were better for
sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fall, and
for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation
in extremest agony rather than that one soul should commit
one venial sin."

In saying that modern philosophy inherited the Greek
tradition as passed through this intervening medium of Chris-
tian thought, I do not mean to say that all features of the
Christian view of nature in relation to God and the fall of
man were taken over. On the contrary, distinctively modern
thought is marked by a revival of the Greek interest and de-
light in nature and natural observation. Thinkers deeply in-
fluenced by modern science often ceased to believe in divine
revelation as supreme authority and adhered to natural reason
in its place. But the supreme place of good as a defining prop-
erty of the ultimately real remained the common premise of
Jew, Catholic and Protestant. If not vouched for by revelation,
it was warranted by the "natural light" of intellect. This phase
of the religious tradition was so deeply ingrained in European
culture that no philosopher except the thoroughgoing sceptics

52

CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES

escaped its influence. In this sense modern philosophy began
its career with an accentuation of the gap which exists between
ultimate and eternal values and natural objects and goods.

Thinkers who remained within the framework of the classic
tradition held that the moral perfection which is the inherent
property of ultimate Being prescribes the law of human ac-
tion. It constitutes the norm of all significant and enduring
values. Reason is necessary to furnish the foundation of truths
without which observations or experience in general cannot
be constituted a science. But it is even more necessary to
provide for the apprehension of the ultimate and immutable
end and law of moral action. When the hierarchical ascent of
nature to mind and to ideal forms was disturbed by the con-
viction that the subject-matter of natural science is exclusively
physical and mechanistic, there arose the dualistic opposition of
matter and spirit, of nature and ultimate ends and goods.

Qualities, excellencies and ends that were extruded from
nature by the new science found their exclusive abode and war-
rant in the realm of the spiritual, which was above nature and
yet which was its source and foundation. The function of rea-
son in determination and enjoyment of the good no longer
formed the consummation of nature. It had a distinct and
separate office. The tension created by the opposition and yet
necessary connection of nature and spirit gave rise to all the
characteristic problems of modern philosophy. It could neither
be frankly naturalistic, nor yet fully spiritualistic to the dis-
regard of the conclusions of physical science. Since man was
on one hand a part of nature and on the other hand a member
of the realm of spirit, all problems came to a focus in his double
nature.

The philosophy of Spinoza is noteworthy for its frank
statement of this problem and for the uniquely thoroughgoing
way in which, given its terms, it was solved. An unqualified

53

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

naturalism in the sense in which he understood the new science
was combined by a miracle of logic with an equally complete
acceptance of the idea, derived from the religious tradition,
that ultimate reality is the measure of perfection and the norm
for human activity. The union thus effected is so complete as
to afford a pattern of instruction regarding the problem of
modern thought. In him, more than in any modern thinker,
there are exhibited complete loyalty to the essential element
in the Hebraic tradition ultimate and self-sufficing Being as
the standard of all human thought and action with perpetua-
tion of the Greek theory of knowledge and its exaltation of
reason over experience, together with enthusiastic adherence
to the new scientific view of nature. Thus he thought to obtain
from the very heart of the new science a conclusive demonstra-
tion of the perfection of Being through which the human soul
can alone obtain absolute security and peace. A scientific com-
prehension was to give, in full reality, by rational means, that
assurance and regulation of life that non-rational religions had
pretended to give.

In his unfinished essay on the The Improvement of the
Human Understanding, he frankly states his impelling motive.
He had experienced, he says, that everything in the ordinary
course of experience is empty and futile. In desperation he set
himself to inquiring whether there is not a good capable of
communicating itself, a good so assured and complete that
the mind can adhere to it to the exclusion of all else: a good
which when found and taken possession of would give him
eternally a constant and supreme bliss. For he had discovered
that the cause of the perturbations and vanities of life was that
affection and desire were fixed upon things which perish. But
"love directed toward that which is eternal and infinite feeds
the mind wholly with joy unmixed with any sadness. . . .
The true good of man is that he should attain, together with

54

CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES

others if possible, to a knowledge of the union which the mind
has with Nature as a whole." He concludes, "I wish to direct
all the sciences to this one end and scope in order that we may
attain to such perf ection."

Certain, enduring and unalloyed Good through the union
of mind with the whole of nature is the theme developed in
detail in the Ethics. There results a philosophy which unites
the Greek idea that man's highest good is demonstrative ra-
tional knowledge of immutable Being j the Hebrew and Chris-
tian conviction that the soul is capable of a way of life which
secures constant and pure blessedness, and the premises and
method of the new science, as he saw the latter. Nature was
completely intelligible j it was at one with mindj to apprehend
nature as a whole was to attain a cognitive certainty which also
afforded a complete certainty of good for the purpose of con-
trol of appetite, desire and affection this latter specification
being one which Greek thought did not include and which
it doubtless would have thought the height of presumption to
lay claim to. Right ordering of human conduct, knowledge of
the highest reality, the enjoyment of the most complete and
unvarying value or good, were combined in one inclusive whole
by means of adoption of the ideas of the complete interdepen-
dence of all things according to universal and necessary law
an idea which he found to be the basis of natural science.

There have been few attempts in modern philosophy as
bold and as direct as is this one to effect a complete integration
of scientific method with a good which is fixed and final, because
based on the rock of absolute cognitive certainty. Few thinkers
have been as willing to sacrifice details of the older tradition
in order to save its substance as was Spinoza. The outcry from
all quarters against him proved that, in the minds of his con-
temporaries and successors, he had made too many concessions
to naturalistic science and necessary law. But this protest should

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

not conceal from us two essential considerations about his wort.
The first of these is that Nature, as the object of knowledge,
is capable of being the source of constant good and a rule of
life, and thus has all the properties and the functions which
the Jewish-Christian tradition attributed to God. He was -hence
entitled to confer upon it the name Natura she Deus. For Na-
ture, as he conceived it, carried with it all the emotional associa-
tions and all the moral force and authority found in the older
religious view of God. It provided an immutable End and Law
for conduct, and it was the source, when rationally known, of
perfect peace and unqualified security. Nature was naturally
that is rationally known, and knowledge of it was such a per-
fect good that when it takes possession of the human mind the
lesser and otherwise disturbing objects of affection and passion
are so included within it as to fall into their proper place of
subordination: that is, of complete control.

The second consideration is that Spinoza exemplifies with
extraordinary completeness the nature of the problem of all
modern philosophies which have not deserted the classic tra-
dition, and yet have made the conclusions of modern science
their own. What makes Spinoza so admirably the exponent of
this problem is that he adopted with ardor and without the res-
ervations displayed by most modern thinkers the essential ele-
ments in the Greek tradition of intellectualism and naturalism,
the Hebrew-Christian idea of the priority and primacy of the
properties of ultimate Being which concern the control of hu-
man affection and endeavor, and the method and conclusions
of the new natural science as he saw them.

The reluctance of other thinkers to follow the model of
solution of their common problems which he offered was not,
however, wholly due to their desire to save portions of the
older moral and religious tradition that he was willing to sur-
render for what seemed to him a greater and more enduring

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CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES

good the unification of science with an ethico-religious con-
trol of the springs of human conduct. There were difficulties
from the side of science itself. Its experimental trend, as dis-
tinct from its mathematical strain, was adverse to Spinoza's
unquestioning faith that the logical order and connection of
ideas is one with the order and connection of existence. For
as the new science developed, the experimental necessity for
sense data and verification by observation reduced the role of
logical and mathematical conceptions from a primary to a
secondary rank. Even his predecessor Descartes, also a devotee
of rationalistic method, had seen that there had to be some
warrant for the application of ideas to nature. Other philoso-
phers felt that after all the perfections with which Spinoza
had so richly dowered Nature as the object of knowledge, were,
in spite of his professed denial of teleology, the fruit of
emotion rather than of logic.

We do not need to trace these complications. They are im-
portant for our purpose because .they induced so many varia-
tions in the treatment of a single underlying problem: the
adjustment to each other of two unquestioned convictions: One,
that knowledge in the form of science reveals the antecedent
properties of reality ; the other, that the ends and laws which
should regulate human affection, desire and intent can be
derived only from the properties possessed by ultimate Being.
If the rest of the chapter is given to a brief survey of the
diverse methods of adjustment which have been propounded,
it is not for the sake of conveying information upon matters
familiar to all students of philosophy. I am concerned only to
set forth illustrations of the way in which unyielding adher-
ence to traditional premises regarding the object of true knowl-
edge and the source of moral authority have set the problem
of modern thought, and to provide illustration of the diverse
and incompatible ways in which "solutions" have been sought.

57

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

Before the rise of the new science of nature there was de-
veloped a method for adjusting the claims of natural reason
and moral authority by means of a division of the field: the
doctrine of "the two-fold nature of truth." The realm of the
ends and values authoritative for conduct was that of the
revealed will of God. The organ for its apprehension was
faith. Nature is the object of knowledge and with respect to it
the claims of reason are supreme. The two realms are so
separate that no conflict can occur. The work of Kant may be
regarded as a perpetuation of the method of adjustment by
means of partition of territories. He did not of course de-
marcate the realm of moral authority on the ground of faith
in revelation. He substituted the idea of faith grounded in
practical reason. But he continued the older distinction of one
realm where the intellect has sway and one in which the re-
quirements of will are supreme. He retained also the notion of
an isolation of the two fields so complete that there is no
possible overlapping and hence no possibility of interference.
If the kingdoms of science and of righteousness nowhere touch,
there can be no strife between them. Indeed, Kant sought to
arrange their relations or lack of relations in such a way that
there should be not merely non-interference but a pact of at
least benevolent neutrality.

Kant's system bristles with points of internal difficulty j
many of these are objects of controversy. Ignoring these as
irrelevant to our problem, it can fairly be asserted that the
main characteristic of his system is precisely a division of terri-
tory between the objects of cognitive certitude and those of
equally complete practical moral assurance. The titles of his
two chief works, the Critiques of Pure Reason and of
Practical Reason are memorials to this interpretation. The first
aims to make secure, on rational a priori grounds, the founda-
tions of natural knowledge j the second performs a like office

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CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES

for the foundations of moral and religious conceptions. Science
is limited to phenomena in space and time in order that the
world of higher and noumenal realities may be appropriated
by ideals and spiritual values. Each has complete jurisdiction
and undisputed sovereignty in its own realm.

Heine's view that the subject-matter of the practical
critique was an afterthought, a concession to the needs and fears
of the multitude represented by his manservant, is wittily ex-
pressed, but will not stand critical examination. Kant's argument
for the justification of the certitude of the foundations of
knowledge is couched at every point so as to indicate the neces-
sity of a higher although intellectually unapproachable realm.
There was nothing factitious, in Kant's own conception, in the
way in which the two kingdoms excluded each other and yet
made each other necessary. On the contrary, the neat way in
which the elements of each dovetailed into those of the other
was to him a convincing proof of the necessity of the system
as a whole. If the dovetailing was the product of his own
intellectual carpentry, he had no suspicion of the fact.

On the contrary, he thought he had disposed, once for all,
of many of the most perplexing problems of prior philosophy.
Upon the scientific side he was concerned to provide a final
philosophical justification, beyond the reach of scepticism, for
the Newtonian science. His conception of space and time as
necessary forms of the possibility of perception was the justi-
fication of the application of mathematics to natural phe-
nomena. Categories of thought necessary to understand per-
ceived objects an understanding necessary to science sup-
plied the foundation of permanent substances and uniform
relations of sequence or causation demanded by the New-
tonian theories of atoms and uniform laws. The tendency of
the mind to pass beyond the limits of experience to the thought
of unconditioned and self-sufficient totalities, "Ideas" of the

59

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

universe, soul and God, was explained j and while cognitive
validity was denied these Ideas, they were admitted as regu-
lative ideals which directed inquiry and interpretation. Above
all, the thought of these trans-phenomenal and super-empirical
realities left room that practical reason with its imperative
of duty and postulate of free choice could fill. Thus the su-
premacy of righteousness according to the Hebraic-Christian
tradition was justified independently of revelation by purely
rational means. Moral demand for the final and unquestionable
authority of duty authorized and necessitated practical certainty
as to the reality of objects beyond experience and incapable of
cognitive verification. The quest for certainty was fulfilled j
cognitive certainty in the region of phenomena, practical cer-
tainty in the realm of moral authority.

This outline of obvious points in Kant's system passes over
points which have received much attention such as the "sub-
jectivity" of his view of space and time and the categories} the
contrast of the a p-iori and the empirical, as well as, in the
Critique of Practical Reason, the seemingly arbitrary way in
which faith in God and immortality are introduced. But with
reference to his ultimate aim of establishing a perfect and
unshakeable adjustment of the certainty of intellectual beliefs
and of moral beliefs, these matters are secondary. The point
on the practical side that had to be protected at all hazards
was that no concrete and empirical material be permitted to
influence ultimate moral realities since this would give natural
science jurisdiction over them and bring them under the sway
of mechanical causality. On the cognitive side, the correspond-
ing point to be certified was restriction of natural science to a
strictly phenomenal world. For then there could be no en-
croachment of specific scientific conclusions upon ultimate, that
is ethico-religious, belief,

In its essential framework, the Kantian scheme thus agreed

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CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES

marvelously well with the needs of the historic crisis. It gave
freedom and a blessing to both science and morals, with a
guarantee that they could never interfere with each other.
Granted the acceptance of the traditional belief that security
of moral authority depends upon some source in Being apart
from the experiences by which values are incarnated in concrete
objects and institutions, the Kantian scheme has such merits
that it is safe to predict that as long as that tradition continues
to have vitality, the main elements of the Kantian system will
have devoted disciples.

The Kantian method is of course but one of a number of
the philosophic attempts at harmonization. There is one phase
of it which may be said to continue the Cartesian attempt to
find the locus of absolute certainty within the knowing mind
itself, surrendering both the endeavor of the ancients to dis-
cover it in the world without, and of the medieval world to
find it in an external revelation. In his search for forms and
categories inherent in the very structure of knowing activity,
Kant penetrated far below the superficial level of innate ideas
in which his predecessors had tried to find the locus of certainty.
Some of them were conditions of the possibility of there being
such a thing as cognitive experience. Others were conditions
of there being such a thing as moral experience. His idealistic
successors pushed their way further on the road which Kant
had broken: even though he insisted that the doors were
locked to traveling on it any further than he had gone.

Solution by the method of partition is always unsatisfactory
to minds with an ambition for comprehensiveness, just as it
commends itself to those of a more modest turn. Moreover,
the very neatness with which the essential traits of Kant's two
realms fitted each other suggested a single underlying and
unifying principle. And Kant himself in various writings had
suggested, particularly in his Critique of Judgment, considera-

61

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

tions which softened the sharpness of their separation from
each other, Fichte and Hegel saw in these things a challenge to
complete a work which Kant had only confusedly undertaken
and had not had the intellectual courage and clarity to execute.

The controlling purpose of the Post-Kantian idealistic sys-
tems was to accomplish by way of integration the task which
Kant attempted by way of division. The contrast between the
methods of Fichte and Hegel is worth a passing notice. Fichte
was wholly in the Hebraic tradition of the supremacy of the
moral. He accordingly attempted unification of the cognitive
and the practical from the side of moral self, the self from
which issues the imperative of duty. The "is" of knowledge is
to be derived from the "ought to be" of morals. The effort
does not seem promising j it appears to speak more for the
ethical ardor of his personality than for the sobriety of his
understanding. Yet given the premises as to the certainty and
supremacy in Being of ideal values prior to all action, Fichte's
method has a logic not to be impeached. If the moral ideal is
the ultimate reality, it is proper to derive the structure and
characteristics of the actual world from the necessities the ideal
imposes and the demands it makes. Argument from the actual
to the ideal is a precarious undertaking, since the actual is in so
many respects so thoroughly un-ideal.

Hegel, on the other hand, is never weary of pouring con-
tempt upon an Ideal that merely ought to be. "The actual is
the rational and the rational is the actual." There is a definite
relaxation of the stern Puritanism of Fichte. The moral task
of man is not to create a world in accord with the ideal but
to appropriate intellectually and in the substance of personality
the meanings v and values already incarnate in an actual world.
Viewed historically, HegePs system may be looked on as a
triumph in material content of the modern secular and positi-
vistic spirit. It is a glorification of the here and now, an indica-

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CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES

tion of the solid meanings and values contained in actual in-
stitutions and arts. It is an invitation to the human subject
to devote himself to the mastery of what is already contained
in the here and now of life and the world, instead of hunting
for some remote ideal and repining because it cannot be found
in existence. In form, however, the old tradition remains intact.
The validity of these meanings and values, their "absolute"
character, is proved by their being shown to be manifestations
of the absolute spirit according to a necessary and demonstrative
logical development: even though Hegel had to create a new
logic to establish the identity of meaning and being.

The Hegelian system is somewhat too grandiose for present
taste. Even his followers find it necessary to temper the claims
made for his logical method. And yet if there be a synthesis in
ultimate Being of the realities which can be cognitively sub-
stantiated and of the meanings which should command our
highest admiration and approval, then concrete phenomena,
barring a complete corruption due to some lapse, ought to be
capable of being exhibited as definite manifestations of the
eternal union of the real-ideal. Perhaps there is no system more
repugnant to the admirers of Spinoza than the Hegelian; and
yet Hegel himself felt, and with considerable reason, that he
was simply doing in a specific and concrete way what Spinoza
had undertaken in a formal and mathematical way. However,
the point important for our purpose is that in both Fichte and
Hegel there is expressed the animating spirit of modern ideal-
ism in dealing with the basic problem of all modern philoso-
phies. They have sought by examination of the structure of
the knowing function (psychological structure in the subjective
idealisms and logical structure in the objective idealisms and
usually with a union of both strains) to show that no matter
what the detailed conclusions of the special sciences, the ideal
authority of truth, goodness, and beauty are secure possessions

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

of ultimate Being independently of experience and human
action.

There have been attempts at adjustment of the results of
knowledge and the demands of ethico-religious authority which
have not been mindful of the classic tradition. Instead of
bringing nature within the fold of value, the order has been
reversed. The physical system has been treated as the supporter
and carrier of all objects having the properties which confer
authority over conduct. A word about the system of Herbert
Spencer among the moderns is appropriate in this connection,
as one about Lucretius would be if antiquity were the theme.
The doctrine that universal evolution is the highest principle
of the physical world, one in which all natural laws are brought
to unity, is accompanied with the idea that the goal of evolution
marks the ideal of moral and religious beliefs and endeavors.
This conclusion is as surely an attempt to adjust the two
elements of the problem as anything found in any idealistic
system. Were there any doubt about this point, Spencer's in-
sistence on the evanescence of evil in the ongoing evolutionary
process would remove it. All evils are the fruits of transitional
maladjustments in the movement of evolution. The perfect
adjustment of man, personal and collective, to the environment
is the evolutionary term, and is one which signifies the elimina-
tion of all evil, physical and moral. The ultimate triumph of
justice and the union of the good of self with the good of
others are identical with the working out of physical law. In
objection to this or that phase of the Spencerian system it is
easily forgotten that fundamentally he is occupied with the
usual quest for a certainty in which a warrant of necessary
knowledge is employed to establish the certainty of Good in
reality.

Comprehensive systems are for the moment out of fashion j
and yet if cognitive certainty is possible and if it is admitted

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that the justification of value lies in its being a property of the
realities which are the objects of knowledge, comprehensive-
ness, whether of the Hegelian or the Spencerian type, would
seem to be the proper ideal of philosophy. And if one believes
that the conclusions of science exhaust the scope of the
universe, then certainly all moral, social and political goods
must fall within them} in that case such a task as that of
Spencer's is not only legitimate but one which philosophy
cannot evade without being subject to the charge of bad
faith.

One more illustration awaits us. Contemporary philosophy
in its realistic forms shows a tendency to revert to adjustment
of the cognitive realm and the realm of values by means of the
method of isolation. In detail, however, the method pursued
is unlike that of Kant in that it does not start from the knowing
mind but rather from the objects of knowing. These, it is
argued, show a radical division into the existential and the
non-existential. Physical science deals with the former; mathe-
matics and logic with the latter. In the former, some things,
namely sense-data, are objects of infallible apprehension; while
certain essences or subsistences, immaterial in nature because
non-existential and non-physical, are the subjects of an equally
assured cognition by reason. Uncertainty appertains only to
combinations of ultimate and simple objects, combinations
formed in reflective thought. As long as we stick to the self-
guaranteed objects, whether of sense or of pure intellect, there
is no opening for any uncertainty or any risk.

In some of these realisms, intrinsic values are included
among the immaterial essences of which we have infallible and
immediate knowledge. Thus the scheme of cognitive certainty
applies all the way through. Science, in its naturalistic sense, is
true of existences; ultimate morals and logic are true of
essences. Philosophy has to do with the just partitioning of the

65

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

field, and with the problems that arise from the union of ex-
istences and essences.

Still another conception of philosophy of a more austere
character has, however, been advanced. According to this view,
values are hopelessly entangled with human affections and im-
pulses, and are too variable to be the objects of any kind of
sure knowledge of anything but variable opinion and guess-
work. The great mistake of historic philosophy has been to
admit values in any shape within the sacred enclosure of per-
fect science. Philosophy is concerned only with propositions
which are true in any possible world, existentially actual or not.
Propositions about good and evil are too dependent upon a
special form of existence, namely human beings with their
peculiar traits, to find a place in the scheme of science. The only
propositions which answer to the specification of pure uni-
versality are logical and mathematical. These by their nature
transcend existence and apply in every conceivable realm.
Owing to the recent developments of mathematics, a philosophy
emancipated from the contingencies of existence is now for
the first time possible.

This view of philosophy has been objected to on the ground
that it rests on an arbitrary limitation of its subject-matter. But
it may be questioned whether this restriction is not a logical
development of that strain in historic philosophy which identi-
fies its subject-matter with whatever is capable of taking on
the form of cognitive certainty. Without committing one's self
to the subjective view of values that seems to be implied, values
are so intimately connected with human affections, choices and
endeavors, that there is ground for holding that the insincere
apologetic features of historic philosophies are connected with
the attempt to combine a theory of the values having moral
authority with a theory of ultimate Being. And a moderate
amount of acquaintance with these philosophies discloses that

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CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES

they have been interested in justifying values drawn from cur-
rent religious faiths and moral codes, not just eternal values
as such: that they have often used the concept of universal
and intrinsic values to cover those which, if not parochial, were
at least exponents of temporal social conditions.

The limitation of philosophy to propositions about what is
logically possible eliminates all special physical propositions as
well as all matters of morals, art and religion. In its chaste
austerity it seems to fulfill the demand for cognitive certainty
as no other conception of philosophy can do. Whether one ac-
cepts or rejects it, there is provided by it an explicit way in which
to raise a question. Because of the sharpness of its delimitation
of the office of philosophy, it elicits clearly the problem of the
idea to be entertained of that office. For with the restriction that
is made there remains over and untouched a problem of the
greatest possible human significance. What is the bearing of
our existential knowledge at any time, the most dependable
knowledge afforded by inquiry, upon our judgments and beliefs
about the ends and means which are to direct our conduct?
What does knowledge indicate about the authoritative guidance
of our affections, desires and affections, our plans and policies?
Unless knowledge gives some regulation, the only alternative
is to fall back on custom, external pressure and the free play
of impulse. There is then need of some theory on this matter.
If we are forbidden to call this theory philosophy by the self-
denying ordinance which restricts it to formal logic, need for
the theory under some other name remains.

There is a fatal ambiguity in the conception of philosophy
as a purely theoretical or intellectual subject. The ambiguity
lies in the fact that the conception is used to cover both the
attitude of the inquirer, the thinker, and the character of the
subject-matter dealt with. The engineer, the physician, the
moralist deal with a subject-matter which is practical; one, that

67

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

is, which concerns things to be done and the way of doing
them. But as far as personal disposition and purpose is con-
cerned, their inquiries are intellectual and cognitive. These men
set out to find out certain things j in order to find them out,
there has to be a purgation of personal desire and preference,
and a willingness to subordinate them to the lead of the subject-
matter inquired into. The mind must be purified as far as is
humanly possible of bias and of that favoritism for one kind
of conclusion rather than another which distorts observation
and introduces an extraneous factor into reflection.

Except, then, on the premise that the subject-matter of
philosophy is fixed properties of antecedent Being, the fact
that it is an intellectual pursuit signifies nothing beyond the
fact that those who engage in it should respect the canons of
fairness, impartiality, of internal consistency and external evi-
dence. It carries no implication with it except on the basis of
a prior assumption save that of intellectual honesty. Only
upon the obverse of the adage that whoso drives fat oxen must
himself be fat, can it be urged that logical austerity of personal
attitude and procedure demands that the subject-matter dealt
with must be made lean by stripping it of all that is human
concern. To say that the object of philosophy is truth is to
make a moral statement which applies to every inquiry. It
implies nothing as to the kind of truth which is to be as-
certained, whether it be of a purely theoretical nature, of a
practical character, or whether it concerns the bearing of one
upon the other. To assert that contemplation of truth for its
own sake is the highest ideal is to make a judgment concerning
authoritative value. To employ this judgment as a means of
determining the office of philosophy is to violate the canon
that inquiry should follow the lead of subject-matter.

It is fair, then, to conclude that the question of the rela-
tions of theory and practice to each other, and of philosophy

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CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES

to both of them, has often been compromised by failure to
maintain the distinction between the theoretical interest which
is another name for intellectual candor and the theoretical
interest which defines the nature of subject-matter. Over and
above this fact, there is reason to suppose that much of the
impatience with the suggestion of the practical in connection
with philosophy is due to the habit of associating "practical"
with affairs of narrow personal concern. The significance of the
idea cannot be thus sheared down without an elimination of
intellectual regard for the values which are to have authority
over our desires and purposes and thus over our entire conduct.
It would seem as if only the cynical sceptic would willingly
take such a stand.

The discussion has indulged in an excursion from the theme
of the problem of modern philosophies. But it is relevant to
our main topic if it serves to make clear the fundamental
ground for the disparaging view held of practical activity.
Depreciation is warranted on the basis of two premises: first,
namely, that the object of knowledge is some form of
ultimate Being which is antecedent to reflective inquiry and
independent of itj secondly, that this antecedent Being has
among its defining characteristics those properties which alone
have authority over the formation of our judgments of value
that is, of the ends and purposes which should control conduct
in all fields intellectual, social, moral, religious, esthetic.
Given these premises and only if they are accepted it fol-
lows that philosophy has for its sole office the cognition of this
Being and its essential properties.

I can understand that the tenor of my discussion may have
aroused a certain impatience among those familiar with current
treatment of politics, morals and art. It will be asked: Where
is there any evidence that this treatment is controlled by regard
for antecedently fixed qualifications of what is taken to be ulti-

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

mately real? It cannot be denied, and I have no interest in
denying, that the vast bulk of critical discussion of such matters
is conducted on quite different grounds, with hardly even a
side glance at any standards which flow from any philosophy
of ultimate grounds. This admission causes two important con-
siderations to stand out the clearer. Traditional religion does
refer all ultimate authoritative norms to the highest reality,
the nature of Godj and failure on the part of those professedly
accepting this religion to carry this reference over to concrete
criticism and judgment in special fields of morals, politics and
art, is only an evidence of the confusion in which modern
thought is entangled. It is this fact which gives the strict ad-
herents to old beliefs, such as those trained in the Catholic
faith, an intellectual advantage over "liberals." For the latter
have no philosophy adequate for their undertakings and com-
mitments.

This consideration brings us to the second point. The failure
to employ standards derived from true Being in the formation
of beliefs and judgments in concrete fields is proof of an isola-
tion from contemporary life that is forced upon philosophy by
its adherence to the two principles which are basic in the classic
tradition. In the middle ages there was no such isolation.
Philosophy and the conduct of life were associated intimately
with one another j there was genuine correspondence. The out-
come is not fortunate for philosophy j it signifies that its subject-
matter is more and more derived from the problems and con-
clusions of its own past history} that it is aloof from the
problems of the culture in which philosophers live.

But the situation has a still more unfortunate phase. For
it signifies intellectual confusion, practically chaos, in respect
to the criteria and principles which are employed in framing
judgments and reaching conclusions upon things of most vital
importance. It signifies the absence of intellectual authority.

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CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES

Old beliefs have dissolved as far as definite operative hold
upon the regulation of criticism and the formation of plans
and policies, working ideals and ends, is concerned. And there
is nothing else to take their place.

When I say "authority" I do not mean a fixed set of doc-
trines by which to settle mechanically problems as they arise.
Such authority is dogmatic, not intellectual. I mean methods
congruous with those used in scientific inquiry and adopting
their conclusions j methods to be used in directing criticism and
in forming the ends and purposes that are acted upon. We
have obtained in constantly accelerated measure in the last few
centuries a large amount of sound beliefs regarding the world
in which we live; we have ascertained much that is new and
striking about life and man. On the other hand, men have de-
sires and affections, hopes and fears, purposes and intentions
which influence the most important actions performed. These
need intellectual direction. Why has modern philosophy con-
tributed so little to bring about an integration between what
we know about the world and the intelligent direction of what
we do? The purport of this chapter is to show that the cause
resides in unwillingness to surrender two ideas formulated in
conditions which both intellectually and practically were very
different from those in which we now live. These two ideas, to
repeat, are that knowledge is concerned with disclosure of the
characteristics of antecedent existences and essences, and that
the properties of value found therein provide the authoritative
standards for the conduct of life.

Both of these traits are due to quest for certainty by cogni-
tive means which exclude practical activity namely, one
which effects actual and concrete modifications in existence.
Practical activity suffers from a double discrediting because of
the perpetuation of these two features of tradition. It is a mere
external follower upon knowledge, having no part in its de-

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

termination. Instead of evolving its own standards and ends
in its own developing processes, it is supposed to conform to
what is fixed in the antecedent structure of things. Herein we
locate the source of that internal division which was said to
characterize modern philosophic thought. It accepts the con-
clusions of scientific inquiry without remaking the conceptions
of mind, knowledge and the character of the object of knowl-
edge that are involved in the methods by which these con-
clusions are reached.

The chapters of which this is the concluding portion are
introductory. They have tried to make clear a problem and the
reasons why it is a problem. If, as has been intimated, the
problem arises from continued adherence to certain conceptions
framed centuries ago and then embodied in the entire western
tradition, the problem is artificial in as far as it would not
arise from reflection upon actual conditions of science and life.
The next task is accordingly to elucidate the reconstructions
of tradition which are involved in the actual procedure and re-
sults of knowing, as this is exemplified in physical inquiry. The
latter is taken as the type and pattern of knowing since it is
the most perfected of all branches of intellectual inquiry. We
shall see that for a long time it also was influenced by the
survival of the traditional conceptions of knowledge and its
supposed relationship to properties of antecedent existence,
while in our own time it has finally emancipated itself and ar-
rived at a consciousness of the principles contained in its own
method. Having discovered what knowledge means in its own
terms, that is, in those of the conduct of knowing as a going
concern, we shall be ready to appreciate the great transforma-
tion that is demanded in the older notions of mind and knowl-
edge. Particularly we shall see how completely the separation
of knowing and doing from one another has broken down.
The conclusion of this part of the discussion will be that stan-

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CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES

dards and tests of validity are found in the consequences of
overt activity, not in what is fixed prior to it and independently
of it. This conclusion will lead us to the final point, the trans-
formation that is required in the conception of the values
which have authority over conduct.

73

CHAPTER IV

THE ART OF ACCEPTANCE AND THE
ART OF CONTROL

THERE WAS A time when "art" and "science" were virtually
equivalent terms. There is a reminiscence of this period in
university organization in the phrase "faculty of arts and
sciences." A distinction was drawn between the "mechanical"
and the "liberal" arts. In part, this distinction was between
industrial arts and social arts, those concerned with things and
those concerned directly with persons. Grammar and rhetoric,
for example, in dealing with speech, the interpretation of liter-
ature and the arts of persuasion, were higher than blacksmith-
ing and carpentry. The mechanical arts dealt with things which
were merely means j the liberal arts dealt with affairs that
were ends, things having a final and intrinsic worth. The
obviousness of the distinction was reenforced by social causes.
Mechanics were concerned with mechanical arts; they were
lower in the social scale. The school in which their arts were
learned was the school of practice: apprenticeship to those who
had already mastered the craft and mystery. Apprentices
literally "learned by doing," and "doing" was routine repeti-
tion and imitation of the acts of others, until personal skill
was acquired. The liberal arts were studied by those who were
to be in some position of authority, occupied with some exercise
of social rule. Such persons had the material means that
afforded leisure, and were to engage in callings that had es-
pecial honor and prestige. Moreover, they learned not by me-
chanical repetition and bodily practice in manipulation of ma-

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ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL

terials and tools, but "intellectually," through a kind of study
which involved mind, not body.

The situation is not recalled as if it had a merely historical
significance. It describes in large measure a state of affairs that
exists to-day. The distinction between "learned professions"
and the occupations of the shop and factory, with correspond-
ing differences of social status, of educational preparation, of
concern chiefly with material things or with persons and social
relations, is too familiar to call for recourse to past history.
The chief difference in the present situation is due to the rise
of technological industry and of a pecuniary economy, at the
expense of the inherited status of the "gentleman," the owner
of large estates in land. So our allusion is pertinent not to
history, but to still existing conditions that are influential in
creating and maintaining the division between theory and
practice, mind and body, ends and instrumentalities.

In addition to this distinction between higher and lower
arts, there always hovered in the background a distinction be-
tween all arts and "science" in the true and ultimate sense of
the words. The liberal arts involved much more of knowledge
and of theoretical study, of use of "mind," than did the me-
chanical. But in their ultimate import they were still connected
with art, with doing, although with a mode of practice held in
higher esteem. They remained within the limits of experience,
although of an experience having a kind of value not found in
the baser arts. The philosophic tradition, as for example it is
formulated by Aristotle, ranked social arts lower than pure
intellectual inquiry, than knowledge as something not to be
put to any use, even a social and moral one. It is conceivable
that historically this point of view might have remained a
mere laudation of its own calling on the part of a small intel-
lectual class. But, as we have already noted, in the expansion
of the Church as a dominant power in Europe, religion affili-

75

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

ated this philosophic conception to itself. Theology was re-
garded as "science" in a peculiar, a unique, sense, for it alone
was knowledge of supreme and ultimate Being. And the
Church had a direct influence over the hearts and conduct,
the beliefs and judgments, of men that a secluded intellectual
class could never win. As the guardians and dispensers of the
truths and sacraments that determined the eternal destiny, the
eternal happiness or misery of the soul, they effected the em-
bodiment of ideas originating in philosophy in the culture of
Christendom.

In consequence, differences and distinctions characteristic
of actual social life received the sanction not merely of the
rational formulation of a few philosophic thinkers but of that
power which had the highest authority and influence in the
lives of men. For this reason, the survey that has been made
of the classic philosophic statement of the dualism between
theory and practice, between mind and body, between reason
and experience (always thought of in terms of sense and the
body) is much more than a piece of historic information. For
in spite of enormous extension of secular interests and of
natural science, of expansion of practical arts and occupations,
of the almost frantic domination of present life by concern for
definite material interests and the organization of society by
forces fundamentally economic, there is no widely held phi-
losophy of life which replaces the traditional classic one as that
was absorbed and modified by the Christian faith.

Traditional philosophy thus has a treble advantage. It has
behind it the multitude of imaginative and emotional associa-
tions and appeals that cluster about any tradition which has
for long centuries been embodied in a dominant institution j
they continue to influence, unconsciously, the minds of those
who no longer give intellectual assent to the tenets on which
the tradition intellectually rests. It has, secondly, the backing

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ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL

of the persistence of the social conditions out of which the
formulation of the dualism between theory and practice origi-
nally grew the familiar grading of activities from the servile
and mechanical to the liberal, the free and socially esteemed. In
addition, there is the enforced recognition of the peril and
frustration in the actual world of meanings and goods most
prized, a matter which makes men ready to listen to the story
of a higher realm in which these values are eternally safe.

In the third place, and finally, there is the negative counter-
part of these positive facts. Conditions and forces that dominate
in actual fact the modern world have not attained any coherent
intellectual expression of themselves. We live, as is so often
remarked, in a state of divided allegiance. In outward activities
and current enjoyments, we are frenetically absorbed in mun-
dane affairs in ways which, if they were formulated for in-
tellectual acceptance, would be repudiated as low and un-
worthy. We give our emotional and theoretical assent to prin-
ciples and creeds which are no longer actively operative in life.
We have retained enough of the older tradition to recognize
that a philosophy which formulated what, on the whole and in
the mass, we are most concerned with, would be intolerably
materialistic in character. On the other hand, we are not pre-
pared, either intellectually or morally, to frame such a philoso-
phy of the interests and activities that actually dominate our
lives as would elevate them to a plane of truly liberal and
humane significance. We are unable to show that the ideals,
values and meanings which the philosophy we nominally hold
places in another world, are capable of characterizing in a
concrete form, with some measure of security, the world in
which we live, that of our actual experience.

On this account any sincere empirical philosophy that holds
to the possibility of the latter alternative must be prophetic
rather than descriptive. It can offer hypotheses rather than re-

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

port of facts adequately in existence. It must support these
hypotheses by argument, rather than by appeal to matters
clearly within the range of easy observation. It is speculative
in that it deals with "futures." Candor demands that these con-
siderations be frankly set forth. But there is also another side
to the matter. There is a distinction between hypotheses
generated in that seclusion from observable fact which renders
them fantasies, and hypotheses that are projections of the possi-
bilities of facts already in existence and capable of report.
There is a difference between the imaginative speculations that
recognize no law except their own dialectic consistency, and
those which rest on an observable movement of events, and
which foresee these events carried to a limit by the force of
their own movement. There is a difference between support by
argument from arbitrarily assumed premises, and an argument
which sets forth the implications of propositions resting upon
facts already vitally significant.

The groundwork of fact that is selected for especial ex-
amination and description in the hypothesis which is to be set
forth is the procedure of present scientific inquiry, in those
matters that are most fully subject to intellectual control
namely, the physical sciences. The state of inquiry in them is
an observable fact, not a speculation nor a matter of opinion
and argument. The selection of this field of fact rather than
some other as that from which to project a hypothesis re-
garding a future possible experience in which experience
will itself provide the values, meanings and standards now
sought in some transcendent world, has both theoretical
and practical justification. From the point of view of technical
philosophy, the nature of knowledge has always been the
foundation arid point of departure for philosophies that have
separated knowing from doing and making, and that in conse-
quence have elevated the objects of knowledge, as measures of

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ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL

genuine reality, above experiences of objects had by the way of
affection and practical action. If, accordingly, it can be shown
that the actual procedures by which the most authentic and de-
pendable knowledge is attained have completely surrendered
the separation of knowing and doing j if it can be shown that
overtly executed operations of interaction are requisite to
obtain the knowledge called scientific, the chief fortress of the
classic philosophical tradition crumbles into dust. With this
destruction disappears also the reason for which some objects,
as fixed in themselves, out of and above the course of human
experience and its consequences, have been set in opposition to
the temporal and concrete world in which we live.

The practical reason for selecting such a technical matter
as the method of physical science is the fact that the application
of natural science, through the medium of inventions and
technologies, is the finally controlling and characteristic fact
of modern life. That western civilization is increasingly in-
dustrial in character is a commonplace} it should be an equally
familiar fact that this industrialization is the direct fruit of
the growth of the experimental method of knowing. The
effects of this industrialization in politics, social arrangements,
communication and intercourse, in work and play, in the de-
termination of the locus of influence, power and prestige, are
characteristic marks of present experience in the concrete. They
are the ultimate source of that waning of the effective influence
of older beliefs that has been alluded to. They also provide
the reason why a philosophy which merely reflected and re-
ported the chief features of the existing situation as if they
were final, without regard to what they may become, would
be so repulsively materialistic. Both the positive fact that our
actual life is more and more determined by the results of
physical science, and the negative fact that these results are so
largely an obstacle to framing a philosophy consonant with

79

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

present experience so influential in inducing men to hold on
to elements of the older tradition are reasons for selecting
the procedure of natural science as the main theme of our
examination.

There will be little time and opportunity for discussion of
the problem in its immediately practical form the potential
significance of that industrial society which has emerged in
consequence of the conclusions and methods of physical knowl-
edge. But it may be pointed out that, in principle, it signifies
simply that the results of intelligence, instead of remaining
aloof and secluded from practice, are embodied in influential
ways in the activities and experience which actually obtains.
Say what we please in derogation of "applied science," in
principle this is what the latter signifies. And there are few
persons, I imagine, who would wittingly proclaim that incarna-
tion of knowledge and understanding in the concrete experi-
ences of life is anything but a good. Derogation on principle
of application of knowledge is, in itself, merely an expression
of the old tradition of the inherent superiority of knowledge
to practice, of reason to experience.

There is a genuine and extremely serious problem in con-
nection with the application of science in life. But it is a practi-
cal, not theoretical, one. That is to say, it concerns the economic
and legal organization of society in consequence of which the
knowledge which regulates activity is so much the monopoly
of the few, and is used by them in behalf of private and class
interests and not for general and shared use. The problem
concerns the possible transformation of social conditions with
respect to their economic and pecuniary basis. This problem
time and space will not permit me to consider. But the pe-
cuniarily economic phase of society is something radically
different from industrialization, and from the inherent conse-
quences of technology in current life. To identify the two

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ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL

affairs breeds only confusion. It must also be noted that this
is a question which has of itself nothing to do with the matter
of the relations of theory and practice, of knowledge and its
application in doing and making. The practical and social
problem is one of effecting a more general equitable distribu-
tion of the elements of understanding and knowledge in con-
nection with work done, activities undertaken, and a conse-
quent freer and more generously shared participation in their
results.

Before engaging in consideration of the significance of the
method of science for formation of the theory of knowledge
and of mind, we shall take up some general points. These are
all connected, at bottom, with the contrast between the idea
of experience framed when arts were mainly routine, skills ac-
quired by mere exercise and practice, and the idea of experi-
ence appropriate when arts have become experimental: or,
put briefly, between experience as empirical and as experi-
mental. "Experience" once meant the results accumulated in
memory of a variety of past doings and undergoings that were
had without control by insight, when the net accumulation
was found to be practically available in dealing with present
situations. Both the original perceptions and uses and the appli-
cation of their outcome in present doings were accidental that
is, neither was determined by an understanding of the relations
of cause and effect, of means and consequences, involved. In
that sense they were non-rational, non-scientific. A typical
illustration is a bridge builder who constructs simply on the
basis of what has been done and what happened in the past,
without reference to knowledge of strains and stresses, or in
general of physical relationships actually involved} or the art
of medicine, as far as it rests simply upon the accidents of
remedial measures used in the past without knowledge of why
some worked and others did not. A measure of skill results,

81

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

but it is the fruit of cut and dried methods, of trial and error
in short it is "empirical."

The disparaging notion of experience framed under such
conditions is an honest report of actual conditions} philosophers
in setting experience down as inherently inferior to rational
science were truthful. What they added was another matter.
It was a statement that this inferiority was inherently connected
with the body, with the senses, with material things, with the
uncertainly changing as over against the certain because immut-
able. Unfortunately their theories in explanation of the defects
of experience persisted and became classic after experience it-
self, in some of its forms, had become experimental in the sense
of being directed by understanding of conditions and their
consequences. Two points are especially significant with refer-
ence to the split thus produced between the traditional theory of
experience and that which results from noting its experimental
character.

In the traditional theory, which still is the prevailing one,
there were alleged to exist inherent defects in perception and
observation as means of knowledge, in reference to the subject-
matter they furnish. This material, in the older notion, is in-
herently so particular, so contingent and variable, that by no
possible means can it contribute to knowledge; it can result
only in opinion, mere belief. But in modern science, there are
only practical defects in the senses, certain limitations of vision,
for example, that have to be corrected and supplemented by
various devices, such as the use of the lens. Every insufficiency
of observation is an instigation to invent some new instrument
which will make good the defect, or it is a stimulus to devising
indirect means, such as mathematical calculations, by which the
limitations of sense will be circumvented. The counterpart of
this change is one in the conception of thought and its relation
to knowing. It was earlier assumed that higher knowledge must

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ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL

be supplied by pure thought j pure because apart from experi-
ence, since the latter involves the senses. Now, it is taken for
granted that thought, while indispensable to knowledge of
natural existence, can never in itself provide that knowledge.
Observation is indispensable both to provide authentic ma-
terials to work upon and to test and verify the conclusions
reached by theoretical considerations. A specified kind of ex-
perience is indispensable to science instead of all experience
setting a limit to the possibility of true science.

There is an objective counterpart of this shift. In the older
theory, sense and experience were barriers to true science be-
cause they are implicated in natural change. Their appropriate
and inevitable subject-matter was variable and changing things.
Knowledge in its full and valid sense is possible only of the
immutable, the fixed} that alone answers the quest for cer-
tainty. With regard to changing things, only surmise and
opinion are possible, just as practically these are the source
of peril. To a scientific man, in terms of what he does in in-
quiry, the notion of a natural science which should turn its
back upon the changes of things, upon events, is simply incom-
prehensible. What he is interested in knowing, in understand-
ing, are precisely the changes that go onj they set his problems,
and problems are solved when changes are interconnected with
one another. Constants and relative invariants figure, but they
are relations between changes, not the constituents of a higher
realm of Being. With this modification with respect to the
object comes one in the structure and content of "experience."
Instead of there being a fixed difference between it and some-
thing higher rational thought there is a difference between
two kinds of experience j one which is occupied with uncon-
trolled change and one concerned with directed and regulated
change. And this difference, while fundamentally important,
does not mark a fixed division. Changes of the first type are

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

something to be brought under control by means of action
directed by understanding of relationships.

In the old scheme, knowledge, as science, signified pre-
cisely and exclusively turning away from change to the change-
less. In the new experimental science, knowledge is obtained
in exactly the opposite way, namely, through deliberate institu-
tion of a definite and specified course of change. The method
of physical inquiry is to introduce some change in order to
see what other change ensues j the correlation between these
changes, when measured by a series of operations, constitutes
the definite and desired object of knowledge. There are two
degrees of control of change which differ practically but are
alike in principle. In astronomy, for example, we cannot intro-
duce variation into remote heavenly bodies. But we can de-
liberately alter the conditions under which we observe them,
which is the same thing in principle of logical procedure. By
special instruments, the use of lens and prism, by telescopes,
spectroscopes, interferometers, etc., we modify observed data.
Observations are taken from widely different points in space
and at successive times. By such means interconnected varia-
tions are observed. In physical and chemical matters closer at
hand and capable of more direct manipulation, changes intro-
duced affect the things under inquiry. Appliances and re-agents
for bringing about variations in the things studied are em-
ployed. The progress of inquiry is identical with advance in
the invention and construction of physical instrumentalities for
producing, registering and measuring changes.

Moreover, there is no difference in logical principle be-
tween the method of science and the method pursued in tech-
nologies. The difference is practical j in the scale of operations
conducted j in the lesser degree of control through isolation of
conditions operative, and especially in the purpose for the
sake of which regulated control of modifications of natural

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ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL

existences and energies is undertaken; especially, since the domi-
nant motive of large scale regulation of the course of change
is material comfort or pecuniary gain. But the technique of
modern industry, in commerce, communication, transportation
and all the appliances of light, heat and electricity, is the
fruit of the modern application of science. And this so-called
"application" signifies that the same kind of intentional intro-
duction and management of changes which takes place in the;
laboratory is induced in the factory, the railway and the power
house.

The central and outstanding fact is that the change in the
method of knowing, due to the scientific revolution begun in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has been accompanied
by a revolution in the attitude of man toward natural occur-
rences and their interactions. This transformation means, as
was intimated earlier, a complete reversal in the traditional
relationship of knowledge and action. Science advances by
adopting the instruments and doings of directed practice, and
the knowledge thus gained becomes a means of the develop-
ment of arts which bring nature still further into actual and
potential service of human purposes and valuations. The as-
tonishing thing is that in the face of this change wrought in
civilization, there still persist the notions about mind and its
organs of knowing, together with the inferiority of practice to
intellect, which developed in antiquity as the report of a totally
different situation.

The hold which older conceptions have gained over the
minds of thinkers, the sway of inertia in habits of philosophic
thought, can be most readily judged by turning to books on
epistemology and to discussions of problems connected with the
theory of knowledge published in the philosophical periodicals.
Articles on logical method will be found which reflect the pro-
cedures of actual knowing, that is of the practice of scientific

85

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

inquiry. But logic is then usually treated as "mere" method-
ology, having little (probably nothing would be nearer the
mark) to do with the theory of knowledge. The latter is dis-
cussed in terms of conceptions about mind and its organs j
these conceptions are supposed to be capable of adequate for-
mation apart from observation of what goes on when men
engage in successful inquiry. Of late, the main problem in
such discussions is to frame a theory of "consciousness" which
shall explain knowing, as if consciousness were either a fact
whose meaning is self-evident, or something less obscure in
content and more observable than are the objective and public
procedures of scientific investigation. This type of discussion
persists j it is, in current conception, the theory of knowledge,
the natural and inevitable way in which to discuss its basic
problems! Volumes could not say more for the persistence
of traditional ideas. The import of even a rudimentary dis-
cussion of actual experimental method can hardly be gath-
ered, then, without bearing in mind its significance as a con-
trast effect.

While the traits of experimental inquiry are familiar, so
little use has been of them in formulating a theory of knowl-
edge and of mind in relation to nature that a somewhat ex-
plicit statement of well known facts is excusable. They exhibit
three outstanding characteristics. The first is the obvious one
that all experimentation involves overt doing, the making of de-
finite changes in the environment or in our relation to it. The
second is that experiment is not a random activity but is directed
by ideas which have to meet the conditions set by the need of
the problem inducing the active inquiry. The third and con-
cluding feature, in which the other two receive their full
measure of meaning, is that the outcome of the directed activity
is the construction of a new empirical situation in which objects
are differently related to one another, and such that the conse-

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ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL

quences of directed operations form the objects that have the
property of being known.

The rudimentary prototype of experimental doing for the
sake of knowing is found in ordinary procedures. When we
are trying to make out the nature of a confused and unfamiliar
object, we perform various acts with a view to establishing a
new relationship to it, such as will bring to light qualities which
will aid in understanding it. We turn it over, bring it into a
better light, rattle and shake it, thump, push and press it, and
so on. The object as it is experienced prior to the introduction
of these changes baffles us; the intent of these acts is to make
changes which will elicit some previously unperceived qualities,
and by varying conditions of perception shake loose some prop-
erty which as it stands blinds or misleads us.

While such experimentations, together with a kind of ex-
perimental playing with things just to see what will happen,
are the chief source of the everyday non-scientific store of in-
formation about things around us, forming the bulk of
"common-sense" knowledge, the limitations of the mode of
procedure are so evident as to require no exposition. The im-
portant thing in the history of modern knowing is the rein-
forcement of these active doings by means of instruments,
appliances and apparatus devised for the purposes of disclosing
relations not otherwise apparent, together with, as far as overt
action is concerned, the development of elaborate techniques
for the introduction of a much greater range of variations
that is, a systematic variation of conditions so as to produce a
corresponding series of changes in the thing under investiga-
tion. Among these operations should be included, of course,
those which give a permanent register of what is observed and
the instrumentalities of exact measurement by means of which
changes are correlated with one another.

These matters are so familiar that their full import for

8?

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

the theory of knowing readily escapes n3tice. Hence the need
of comparing this kind of knowledge of natural existences with
that obtaining before the rise of the experimental method.
The striking difference is, of course, the dependence placed
upon doing, doing of a physical and overt sort. Ancient science,
that is, what passed as science, would have thought it a kind
of treason to reason as the organ of knowing to subordinate it
to bodily activity on material things, helped out with tools
which are also material. It would have seemed like admitting
the superiority of matter to rational mind, an admission which
from its standpoint was contradictory to the possibility of
knowledge.

With this fundamental change goes another, that in the
attitude taken toward the material of direct sense-perception.
No notion could be further away from the fact than the some-
what sedulously cultivated idea that the difference between
ancient and modern science is that the former had no respect
for perception and relied exclusively upon speculation. In fact,
the Greeks were keenly sensitive to natural objects and were
keen observers. The trouble lay not in substitution of theoriz-
ing from the outset for the material of perception, but in that
they took the latter "as is"; they made no attempt to modify
it radically before undertaking thinking and theorizing about
it. As far as observation unaided by artificial appliances and
means for deliberate variation of observed material went, the
Greeks went far.

Their disrespect for sensibly observed material concerned
only its form. For it had to be brought under logical forms
supplied by rational thought. The fact that the material was
not exclusively logical, or such as to satisfy the requirements
of rational form, made the resulting knowledge less scientific
than that of pure mathematics, logic and metaphysics occupied
with eternal Being. But as far as science extended, it dealt with

ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL

the material of sense-perception as it directly offered itself to
a keen and alert observer. In consequence, the material of
Greek natural science is much closer to "common sense" ma-
terial than are the results of contemporary science. One can
read the surviving statements of it without any more technical
preparation than say a knowledge of Euclidean geometry,
while no one can follow understandingly the reports of most
modern investigations in physics without a highly technical
preparatory education. One reason the atomic theory pro-
pounded in antiquity made so little headway is that it did not
agree with the results of ordinary observation. For this pre-
sented objects clothed with rich qualities and falling into kinds
or species that were themselves marked by qualitative, rather
than by merely quantitative and spatial, differences. In antiquity
it was the atomic theory which was purely speculative and "de-
ductive" in character.

These statements would be misunderstood if they were
taken to imply an allegation that in ancient science sense
gives knowledge, while modern science excludes the material
of sense} such an idea inverts the facts. But ancient science
accepted the material of sense-material on its face, and then
organized it, as it naturally and originally stood, by operations
of logical definition, classification into species and syllogistic
subsumption. Men either had no instruments and appliances
for modifying the ordinary objects of observation, for analyz-
ing them into their elements and giving them new forms and
arrangements, or they failed to use those which they had. Thus
in content, or subject-matter, the conclusions of Greek science
(which persisted till the scientific revolution of the seventeenth
century), were much closer to the objects of everyday experi-
ence than are the objects of present scientific thought. It is not
meant that the Greeks had more respect for the function of per-
ception through the senses than has modern science, but that,

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

judged from present practice, they had altogether too mucfy
respect for the material of direct, unanalyzed sense-perception.

They were aware of its defects from the standpoint of
knowledge. But they supposed that they could correct these
defects and supplement their lack by purely logical or "ra-
tional" means. They supposed that thought could take the ma-
terial supplied by ordinary perception, eliminate varying and
hence contingent qualities, and thus finally reach the fixed and
immutable form which makes particulars have the character
they havej define this form as the essence or true reality of the
particular things in question, and then gather a group of per-
ceived objects into a species which is as eternal as its particular
exemplifications are perishable. The passage from ordinary
perception to scientific knowledge did not therefore demand
the introduction of actual, overt and observed changes into the
material of sense perception. Modern science, with its changes
in the subject-matter of direct perception effected by the use
of apparatus, gets away not from observed material as such,
but from the qualitative characteristics of things as they are
originally and "naturally" observed.

It may thus be fairly asserted that the "categories" of
Greek description and explanation of natural phenomena were
esthetic in character j for perception of the esthetic sort is
interested in things in their immediate qualitative traits. The
logical features they depended upon to confer scientific form
upon the material of observation were harmony, proportion or
measure, symmetry: these constitute the "logos" that renders
phenomena capable of report in rational discourse. In virtue
of these properties, superimposed upon phenomena but thought
to be elicited from them, natural objects are knowable. Thus
the Greeks employed thinking not as a means of changing
given objects of observation so as to get at the conditions and
effects of their occurrence, but to impose upon them certain

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static properties not found in them in their changeable occur-
rence. The essence of the static properties conferred upon
them was harmony of form and pattern. Craftsmen, architects,
sculptors, gymnasts, poets had taken raw material and con-
verted it into finished forms marked by symmetry and pro-
portion j they accomplished this task without the prior dis-
integrative reduction which characterizes modern making in
the factory. Greek thinkers performed a like task for nature
as a whole. Instead, however, of employing the material tools
of the crafts, they depended upon thought alone. They bor-
rowed the form provided them in Greek art in abstraction from
its material appliances. They aimed at constructing out of
nature, as observed, an artistic whole for the eye of the soul
to behold. Thus for science nature was a cosmos. It was com-
posed, but it was not a composite of elements. That is, it was a
qualitative whole, a whole as is a drama, a statue or a temple,
in virtue of a pervading and dominant qualitative unity j it
was not an aggregate of homogenous units externally arranged
in different modes. Design was the form and pattern in-
trinsically characteristic of things in their fixed kinds, not some-
thing first formed in a designing mind and then imposed from
without.

In his Creative Evolution, Bergson remarks that to the
Greek mind that reality which is the object of the truest knowl-
edge is found in some privileged moment when a process of
change attains its climactic apogee. The Ideas of Plato and the
Forms of Aristotle, as he says, may be compared in their rela-
tion to particular things to the horses of the Parthenon frieze
in relation to the casual movements of horses. The essential
movement which gives and defines the character of the horse
is summed up in the eternal moment of a static position and
form. To see, to grasp, that culminating and defining form,
and by grasping to possess and enjoy it, is to know.

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This afergu of Bergson illustrates the conception of the
essentially artistic character possessed for Greek science by the
object of knowledge. It is borne out by the details of Greek
science. I know of no one thing more significant for an under-
standing of Greek science than Aristotle's treatment of quantity
as an accident, that is, as something which can vary within
limits (set by the inherent essence and measure, logos) of a
thing without affecting its nature. When we think of the
Cartesian definition of quantity as the essence of matter, we
appreciate that an intellectual revolution has taken place: a
radical change in point of view and not just the product of
more, and more accurately stated, information, but a change
involving surrender of the esthetic character of the object.
Contrast the place occupied in modern science by relations with
the Aristotelian illustrations of their nature namely, distinc-
tions of more and less, greater and smaller, etc. For the point
of Aristotle's treatment is that relations, like quantity, are
indifferent to the essence or nature of the object, and hence are
of no final account for scientific knowledge. This conception is
thoroughly appropriate to an esthetic point of view, wherein
that which is internally complete and self-sufficing is the all-
important consideration.

The addiction of Pythagorean-Platonism to number and
geometry might seem to contradict what has been said. But it
is one of the exceptions that proves the rule. For geometry and
number in this scheme were means of ordering natural phe-
nomena as they are directly observed. They were principles of
measure, symmetry and allotment that satisfied canons essen-
tially esthetic. Science had to wait almost two thousand years
for mathematics to become an instrument of analysis, of reso-
lution into elements for the sake of recomposition, through
equations and other functions.

I pass by the evidence of the qualitative character of Greek

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science afforded by the central position of kinds or species in
Peripatetic science. The instance is too obvious. More instruc-
tive is the purely qualitative treatment of movements, es-
pecially as this is the matter that gives the clue to the revolu-
tion wrought by Galileo. Movement was a term covering all
sorts of qualitative alterations, such as warm things becoming
cold, growth from embryo to adult form, etc. It was never
conceived of as merely motion, i.e., change of position in a
homogeneous space. When we speak of a musical movement,
or a political movement, we come close to the sense attached
to the idea in ancient science: a series of changes tending to
complete or perfect a qualitative whole and fulfill an end.

Movement instead of continuing indefinitely spent itself j
it tended inherently toward its own cessation, toward rest. The
problem was not what external forces bring the arrow to a
state of relative rest but what external forces, currents of air,
etc., keep it moving and prevent its speedier attainment of its
own natural goal, rest. Cessation of movement is either ex-
haustion, a kind of fatigue, or it marks the culmination of in-
trinsic proper being or essence. The heavenly bodies, just be-
cause they are heavenly, and therefore quasi-divine, are un-
wearied, never tiring, and so keep up their ceaseless round.
For rest when it meant fulfillment was not dead quiescence but
complete and therefore unchanging movement. Only thought
is completely possessed of this perfect self -activity j but the con-
stant round of heavenly bodies is the nearest physical manifes-
tation of the self-enclosed changeless activity of thought, which
discovers nothing, learns nothing, effects nothing, but eternally
revolves upon itself.

The treatment of place or rather places is the counter-
part of this qualitative diversification of movements. There is
movement up from the earth, in the measure of their lightness,
of those things which belong in the upper spaces j a downward

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movement to the earth of those things which because of their
grossness attain their end and arrive at their home only in the
gross and relatively cold earth. To the intermediate regions is
appropriate neither upward nor downward movement but the
back and forth and wavering movement characteristic of winds
and the (apparent) motions of the planets. As the cold and
heavy moves down, the light and fiery, the finest material
moves upward. The stars of the firmament being the most
nearly divine, the most purged of the irregular and merely
potential, pursue that undeviating circular course which is the
Dearest approach in nature to the eternal self-activity of
thought, which is at once beyond nature and its culmination or
"final cause."

These details are mentioned to make clear the completely
qualitative character of antique science. There was no conflict
with ideas about values, because the qualities belonging to
objects of science are values j they are the things we enjoy and
prize. Throughout nature as a qualitative whole there is a
hierarchy of forms from those of lower value to those of
higher. The revolution in science effectively initiated by
Galileo consisted precisely in the abolition of qualities as traits
of scientific objects as such. From this elimination proceeded
just that conflict and need of reconciliation between the
scientific properties of the real and those which give moral
authority. Therefore to apprehend what the new astronomy
and physics did for human beliefs, we have to place it in its
contrast with the older natural science in which the qualities
possessed by objects of scientific knowledge were precisely the
same as those possessed by works of art, the properties which
are one with beauty and with all that is admirable.

The work of Galileo was not a development, but a revolu-
tion. It marked a change from the qualitative to the quantita-
tive or metric} from the heterogeneous to the homogeneous j

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from intrinsic forms to relations} from esthetic harmonies to
mathematical formulae} from contemplative enjoyment to ac-
tive manipulation and control} from rest to change} from
eternal objects to temporal sequence. The idea of a two-realm
scheme persisted for moral and religious purposes} it vanished
for purposes of natural science. The higher realm which had
been the object of true science became the exclusive habitat of
objects connected with values that in their relation to man
furnish the norm and end of human destiny. The lower realm
of change which had been the subject of opinion and practice be-
came the sole and only object of natural science. The realm
in which opinion held sway was no longer a genuine although
inferior portion of objective being. It was a strictly human
product, due to ignorance and error. Such was the philosophy
which, because of the new science, replaced the old metaphysics.
But and this "but" is of fundamental importance in spite
of the revolution, the old conceptions of knowledge as related
to an antecedent reality and of moral regulation as derived
from properties of this reality, persisted.

Neither the scientific nor the philosophic change came at
once, even after experimental inquiry was initiated. In fact as
we shall see Jater, philosophy proceeded conservatively by
compromise and accommodation, and was read into the new
science, so that not till our own generation did science free
itself from some basic factors of the older conception of nature.
Much of the scientific revolution was implicit, however, in the
conclusions which Galileo drew from his two most famous
experiments. The one with falling bodies at the tower of Pisa
destroyed the old distinction of intrinsic qualitative differences
of gravity and levity, and thus gave an enormous shock to the
qualitative explanatory principles of science. It thus tended to
undermine the description and explanation of natural phe-
nomena in terms of heterogeneous qualities. For it showed

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that the immanent motion of bodies was connected witH a
common homogeneous property, one measured by their re-
sistance to being set in motion and to having their motion ar-
rested or deflected when once set in operation. This property,
called inertia, was finally identified by Newton with mass, so
that mass or inertia became the scientific definition or stable
co-efficient of matter, in complete indifference to the qualitative
differentiations of wet-dry, hot-cold, which were henceforth
things to be explained by means of mass and motion, not funda-
mental explanatory principles.

Taken in isolation, it is conceivable that this result would
have been only a shock, or at most a ferment. Not so, however,
when it was connected with his experiment of balls rolling
down a smooth inclined plane (of which his experiment with
the pendulum was a variation), the nearest approximation he
could make to observation of freely falling bodies. His purpose
was to determine the relation of the measured time of falling
to the measured space passed through. Observed results con-
firmed the hypothesis he had previously formed, namely, that
the space traversed is proportional to the square of the elapsed
time. If we forget the background of Peripatetic science against
which this conclusion was projected, it appears as a mathe-
matical determination of acceleration, and in connection with
the concept of mass, as affording a new and accurate definition
of force. This result is highly important. But apart from the
classic background of beliefs about nature, it would have been
of the same type as important discoveries in physics to-day.
In its opposition to the basic ideas of Peripatetic science, it
ushered in the scientific revolution. Galileo's conclusions were
absolutely fatal to the traditional conception that all bodies in
motion come naturally to rest because of their own intrinsic
tendency to fulfill an inherent nature. The ingenious mind of
Galileo used his results to show that if a body moving on a

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horizontal plane, not subjected to the independent force of
uniform gravity, were substituted for the body on an inclined
plane, it would when once set in motion continue in motion
indefinitely the idea later formulated in Newton's first law
of motion.

The revolution opened the way to description and ex-
planation of natural phenomena on the basis of homogeneous
space, time, mass and motion. Our discussion is not an account
of the historic development, and details are passed over. But
some of the generic results which followed must be summarily
mentioned. Galileo's conclusion did not at first affect the tra-
dition that bodies at rest remained at rest. But his logic and
the further use of his methods showed that that when a gross
body is brought to rest, motion is transferred to its own
particles and to those of the body which checked its movement.
Thus heat became subject to mechanical treatment, and in
the end the conversion of mechanical motion, heat, light, elec-
tricity into one another without loss of energy was established.
Then it was shown by Newton, following Copernicus and Huy-
gens, that the movements of the planets obey the same me-
chanical laws of mass and acceleration as mundane bodies.
Heavenly bodies and movements were brought under the same
laws as are found in terrestrial phenomena. The idea of the
difference in kind between phenomena in different parts of
space was abolished. All that counted for science became me-
chanical properties formulated in mathematical terms: the
significance of mathematical formulation marking the possi-
bility of complete equivalence or homogeneity of translation
of different phenomena into one another's terms.

From the standpoint of the doctrine that the purpose of
knowledge is to grasp reality and that the object of cognition
and real objects are synonymous terms, there was but one con-
clusion possible. This, in the words of a recent writer, was

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that "the Newtonian astronomy revealed the whole heavenly
realm as a dark and limitless emptiness wherein dead matter
moved under the impulse or insensate forces, and thus finally
destroyed the poetic dream of ages." *

The conclusion holds good, however, only under condition
that the premise be held to. If and as far as the qualitative
world was taken to be an object of knowledge, and not of
experience in some other form than knowing, and as far as
knowing was held to be the standard or sole valid mode of
experiencing, the substitution of Newtonian for Greek science
(the latter being but a rationalized arrangement of the quali-
tatively enjoyed world of direct experience) signified that the
properties that render the world one of delight, admiration and
esteem, have been done away with. There is, however, another
interpretation possible. A philosophy which holds that we ex-
perience things as they really are apart from knowing, and
that knowledge is a mode of experiencing things which facili-
tates control of objects for purposes of non-cognitive experi-
ences, will come to another conclusion.

To go into this matter at this point would, however, an-
ticipate later discussion. Consequently we confine comment here
to the one question: Just what did the new experimental method
do to the qualitative objects of ordinary experience? Forget the
conclusions of Greek philosophy, put out of the mind all
theories about knowlege and about reality. Take the simple
direct facts: Here are the colored, resounding, fragrant, lova-
ble, attractive, beautiful things of nature which we enjoy, and
which we suffer when they are hateful, ugly, disgusting. Just
what is the effect upon them wrought by physical science?

If we consent for the time being to denude the mind of
philosophical and metaphysical presuppositions, and take the

* Barry, The Scientific Habit of Mind, New York, 1927, p. 249. I owe much
more to this volume than this particular quotation.

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matter in the most simple and naive way possible, I think our
answer, stated in technical terms, will be that it substitutes data
for objects. (It is not meant that this outcome is the whole
effect of the experimental method; that as we saw at the outset
is complex; but that the first effect as far as stripping away
qualities is concerned is of this nature.) That Greek science
operated with objects in the sense of the stars, rocks, trees, rain,
warm and cold days of ordinary experience is evident enough.
What is signified by saying that the first effect of experimenta-
tion was to reduce these things from the status of objects to
that of data may not be so clear.* By data is signified subject-
matter for further interpretation; something to be thought
about. Objects are finalities; they are complete, finished; they
call for thought only in the way of definition, classification,
logical arrangement, subsumption in syllogisms, etc. But data
signify "material to serve"; they are indications, evidence,
signs, clues to and of something still to be reached; they are
intermediate, not ultimate; means, not finalities.

In a less technical way the matter may be stated as follows:
The subject-matter which had been taken as satisfying the
demands of knowledge, as the material with which to frame
solutions, became something which set problems. Hot and cold,
wet and dry, light and heavy, instead of being self-evident mat-
ters with which to explain phenomena, were things to be investi-
gated; they were "effects," not causal principles; they set
question marks instead of supplying answers. The differences
between the earth, the region of the planets, and the heavenly
ether, instead of supplying ultimate principles which could be
used to mark off and classify things, were something to be
explained and to bring under identical principles. Greek and
medieval science formed an art of accepting things as they are

* For this shift from objects to data see G. H. Mead's essay in the volume
entitled Creative Intelligence, New York, 1917.

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enjoyed and suffered. Modern experimental science is an art
of control.

The remarkable difference between the attitude which ac-
cepts the objects of ordinary perception, use and enjoyment
as final, as culminations of natural processes and that which
takes them as starting points for reflection and investigation,
is one which reaches far beyond the technicalities of science.
It marks a revolution in the whole spirit of life, in the entire
attitude taken toward whatever is found in existence. When
the things which exist around us, which we touch, see, hear
and taste are regarded as interrogations for which an answer
must be sought (and must be sought by means of deliberate
introduction of changes till they are reshaped into something
different), nature as it already exists ceases to be something
which must be accepted and submitted to, endured or en-
joyed, just as it is. It is now something to be modified, to be
intentionally controlled. It is material to act upon so as to
transform it into new objects which better answer our needs.
Nature as it exists at any particular time is a challenge, rather
than a completion j it provides possible starting points and op-
portunities rather than final ends.

In short, there is a change from knowing as an esthetic
enjoyment of the properties of nature regarded as a work of
divine art, to knowing as a means of secular control that is,
a method of purposefully introducing changes which will alter
the direction of the course of events. Nature as it exists at a
given time is material for arts to be brought to bear upon it to
reshape it, rather than already a finished work of art. Thus
the changed attitude toward change to which reference was
made has a much wider meaning than that which the new
science offered as a technical pursuit. When correlations of
changes are made the goal of knowledge, the fulfillment of its
aim in discovery of these correlations, is equivalent to placing

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in our hands an instrument of control. When one change is
given, and we know with measured accuracy its connection
with another change, we have the potential means of producing
or averting that other event. The esthetic attitude is of necessity
directed to what is already there j to what is finished, com-
plete. The attitude of control looks to the future, to pro-
duction.

The same point is stated in another way in saying that the
reduction of given objects to data for a knowing or an investi-
gation still to be undertaken liberates man from subjection to
the past. The scientific attitude, as an attitude of interest in
change instead of interest in isolated and complete fixities, is
necessarily alert for problems} every new question is an op-
portunity for further experimental inquiries for effecting
more directed change. There is nothing which a scientific mind
would more regret than reaching a condition in which there
were no more problems. That state would be the death of
science, not its perfected life. We have only to contrast this
disposition with that which prevails in morals and politics to
realize the difference which has already been made, as well as
to appreciate how limited its development still is. For in higher
practical matters we still live in dread of change and of prob-
lems. Like men of olden time with respect to natural phe-
nomena we prefer to accept and endure or to enjoy as the
case may happen to be what is, what we find in possession
of the field, and at most, to arrange it under concepts, and
thus give it the form of rationality.

Before the rise of experimental method, change was simply
an inevitable evilj the world of phenomenal existence, that is
of change, while an inferior realm compared with the change-
less, was nevertheless there and had to be accepted practically
as it happened to occur. The wise man if he were sufficiently
endowed by fortune would have as little to do with such things

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as possible, turning away from them to the rational realm.
Qualitative forms and complete ends determined by nature
are not amenable to human control. They are grateful when
they happen to be enjoyed, but for human purposes nature
means fortune, and fortune is the contrary of art. A good that
happens is welcome. Goods, however, can be made secure in
existence only through regulation of processes of change, a
regulation dependent upon knowledge of their relations. While
the abolition of fixed tendencies toward definite ends has been
mourned by many as if it involved a despiritualization of na-
ture, it is in fact a precondition of the projection of new ends
and of the possibility of realizing them through intentional
activity. Objects which are not fixed goals of nature and
which have no inherent defining forms become candidates for
receiving new qualities} means for serving new purposes. Until
natural objects were denuded of determinate ends which were
regarded as the proper outcome of the intrinsic tendency of
nature's own operations, nature could not become a plastic
material of human desires and purposes.

Such considerations as these are implicit in that changed
attitude which by experimental analysis reduces objects to data:
the aim of science becomes discovery of constant relations
among changes in place of definition of objects immutable
beyond the possibility of alteration. It is interested in the
mechanism of occurrences instead of in final causes. In dealing
with the proximate instead of with the ultimate, knowledge
deals with the world in which we live, the world which is
experienced, instead of attempting through the intellect to
escape to a higher realm. Experimental knowledge is a mode
of doing, and like all doing takes place at a time, in a place,
and under specifiable conditions in connection with a definite
problem.

The notion that the findings of science are a disclosure of

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the inherent properties of the ultimate real, of existence at
large, is a survival of the older metaphysics. It is because of
injection of an irrelevant philosophy into interpretation of the
conclusions of science that the latter are thought to eliminate
qualities and values from nature. Thus is created the standing
problem of modern philosophy: the relation of science to the
things we prize and love and which have authority in the direc-
tion of conduct. The same injection, in treating the results of
mathematical-mechanistic science as a definition of natural real-
ity in its own intrinsic nature, accounts for the antagonism
shown to naturalism, and for the feeling that it is the busi-
ness of philosophy to demonstrate the being of a realm beyond
nature, one not subject to the conditions which mark all natural
objects. Drop the conception that knowledge is knowledge only
when it is a disclosure and definition of the properties of fixed
and antecedent reality j interpret the aim and test of knowing
by what happens in the actual procedures of scientific inquiry,
and the supposed need and problem vanish.

For scientific inquiry always starts from things of the en-
vironment experienced in our everyday life, with things we
see, handle, use, enjoy and suffer from. This is the ordinary
qualitative world. But instead of accepting the qualities and
values the ends and forms of this world as providing the
objects of knowledge, subject to their being given a certain
logical arrangement, experimental inquiry treats them as of-
fering a challenge to thought. They are the materials of
problems not of solutions. They are to be known, rather
than objects of knowledge. The first step in knowing is to
locate the problems which need solution. This step is per-
formed by altering obvious and given qualities. These are
effects} they are things to be understood, and they are under-
stood in terms of their generation. The search for "efficient
causes" instead of for final causes, for extrinsic relations in-

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stead of intrinsic forms, constitutes the aim of science. But the
search does not signify a quest for reality in contrast with
experience of the unreal and phenomenal. It signifies a search
for those relations upon which the occurrence of real qualities
and values depends, by means of which we can regulate their
occurrence. To call existences as they are directly and quali-
tatively experienced "phenomena" is not to assign to them a
metaphysical status. It is to indicate that they set the problem
of ascertaining the relations of interaction upon which their
occurrence depends.

It is unnecessary that knowledge should be concerned with
existence as it is directly experienced in its concrete qualities.
Direct experiencing itself takes care of that matter. What
science is concerned with is the ha^enmg of these experienced
things. For its purpose, therefore, they are happenings, events.
Its aim is to discover the conditions and consequences of their
happening. And this discovery can take place only by modify-
ing the given qualities in such ways that relations become mani-
fest. We shall see later that these relations constitute the
proper objects of science as such. We are here concerned to
emphasize the fact that elimination of the qualities of ex-
perienced existence is merely an intermediate step necessary to
the discovery of relations, and that when it is accomplished the
scientific object becomes the means of control of occurrence of
experienced things having a richer and more secure equipment
of values and qualities.

Only when the older theory of knowledge and metaphysics
is retained, is science thought to inform us that nature in its
true reality is but an interplay of masses in motion, without
sound, color, or any quality of enjoyment and use. What
science actually does is to show that any natural object we
please may be treated in terms of relations upon which its
occurrence depends, or as an event, and that by so treating it

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we are enabled to get behind, as it were, the immediate quali-
ties the object of direct experience presents, and to regulate
their happening, instead of having to wait for conditions be-
yond our control to bring it about. Reduction of experienced
objects to the form of relations, which are neutral as respects
qualitative traits, is a prerequisite of ability to regulate the
course of change, so that it may terminate in the occurrence of
an object having desired qualities.

As long, for example, as water is taken to be just the thing
which we directly expedience it to be, we can put it to a few
direct uses, such as drinking, washing, etc. Beyond heating it
there was little that could be done purposefully to change its
properties. When, however, water is treated not as the glisten-
ing, rippling object with the variety of qualities that delight
the eye, ear, and palate, but as something symbolized by FLO,
something from which these qualities are completely absent, it
becomes amenable to all sorts of other modes of control and
adapted to other uses. Similarly, when steam and ice are no
longer treated as what they are in their qualitative differences
from one another in direct experience, but as homogeneous
molecules moving at measured velocities through specified dis-
tances, differential qualities that were barriers to effective regu-
lations, as long as they were taken as finalities, are done away
with. A single way of acting with respect to them in spite of
their differences is indicated. This mode of action is capable
of extension to other bodies, in principle to any bodies irre-
spective of qualitative differences of solid, liquid and gaseous,
provided they are given a like mathematical formulation.
Thus all sorts of modes of expansion and contraction, of re-
frigeration and evaporation, of production and regulation of
explosive power, become possible. From the practical stand-
point, bodies become aggregates of energies to be used in all
kinds of ways, involving all sorts of substitutions, transf orma-

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tions, combinations and separations. But the object of direct or
perceptible experience remains the same qualitative object,
enjoyable and usable, it always was. Water as an object of
science, as HUO with all the other scientific propositions which
can be made about it, is not a rival for position in real being
with the water we see and use. It is, because of experimental
operations, an added instrumentality of multiplied controls and
uses of the real things of everyday experience.

I am aware that this method of dealing with the great
problem of modern philosophy will be regarded by many as
too cavalier a disposition of a great issue j the solution if there
be any (and many thinkers would perhaps feel any solution to
be a real deprivation) is too simple and easy to be satisfactory.
But I shall be content if the account leads anyone to recon-
sider the traditional beliefs which stand in the way of accep-
tance of the solution that is proposed. These preconceptions
are the assumption that knowledge has a uniquely privileged
position as a mode of access to reality in comparison with
other modes of experience, and that as such it is superior to
practical activity. Both of these ideas were formulated in a
period when knowing was regarded as something which could
be effected exclusively by means of the rational powers of
mind. The development of scientific inquiry with its complete
dependence upon experimentation has proved the profound
error of the latter position. Is it not time to revise the philo-
sophical conceptions which are founded on a belief now
proved to be false? The sum and substance of the present
argument is that if we frame our conception of knowledge on
the experimental model, we find that it is a way of operating
upon and with the things of ordinary experience so that we
can frame our ideas of them in terms of their interactions
with one another, instead of in terms of the qualities they
directly present, and that thereby our control of them, our

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ability to change them and direct their changes as we desire,
is indefinitely increased. Knowing is itself a mode of practical
action and is the way of interaction by which other natural
interactions become subject to direction. Such is the significance
of the experimental method as far as we have as yet traced
its course.

As was stated at the beginning of this part of the discus-
sion, the examination of scientific knowing is undertaken not
so much for its own sake as in order to supply material for pro-
jecting a hypothesis about something less technical and of
wider and more liberal application. The ulterior issue is the
possibility that actual experience in its concrete content and
movement may furnish those ideals, meanings and values
whose lack and uncertainty in experience as actually lived by
most persons has supplied the motive force for recourse to
some reality beyond experience: a lack and uncertainty that
account for the continued hold of traditional philosophical
and religious notions which are not consonant with the main
tenor of modern life. The pattern supplied by scientific know-
ing shows that in this one field at least it is possible for ex-
perience, in becoming genuinely experimental, to develop its
own regulative ideas and standards. Not only this, but in addi-
tion the progress of knowledge of nature has become secure
and steady only because of this transformation. The conclusion
is a good omen for the possibility of achieving in larger, more
humane and liberal fields a similar transformation, so that a
philosophy of experience may be empirical without either being
false to actual experience or being compelled to explain away
the values dearest to the heart of man.

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CHAPTER V
IDEAS AT WORK

OF ALL PHILOSOPHICAL problems that which concerns the na-
ture and worth of ideas is probably the one that most readily
appeals to any cultivated mind. The eulogistic flavor which
hangs about the word Idealism is a tribute to the respect men
pay to thought and its power. The obnoxious quality of mate-
rialism is due to its depression of thought, which is treated as
an illusion or at most an accidental by-product j materialism
leaves no place where ideas have creative or regulative effect.
In some sense the cause of ideas, of thought, is felt to be that
of the distinctive dignity of man himself. Serious minds have
always desired a world in which experiences would be produc-
tive of ideas, of meanings, and in which these ideas in turn
would regulate conduct. Take away ideas and what follows
from them and man seems no better than the beasts of the
field.

It is, however, an old story that philosophers have divided
into opposed schools as to the nature of ideas and their power.
To the extreme right are those who, under the banner of Ideal-
ism, have asserted that thought is the creator of the universe
and that rational ideas constitute its structure. This constitutive
work, however, is something done once for all by thought in a
transcendental aboriginal work. The empirical world in which
we live from day by day is crass and obdurate, stubbornly un-
ideal in character because it is only an appearance of the reality
of which thought is the author. This philosophic mode of pay-
ing reverence to ideas is thus compensatory rather than vital.

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IDEAS AT WORK

It has nothing to do with rendering the natural and social
environment of our experience a more ideal abode, namely, one
characterized by meanings which are the fruits of thought.
There are those who would be willing to exchange the thought
which constitutes reality once for all for that thinking which
by continued particular acts renders our experienced world
here and now more charged with coherent and luminous
meanings.

At the other pole is the school of sensational empiricists
who hold that the doctrine that thought in any mode of opera-
tion is originative is an illusion. It proclaims the necessity of
direct, first-hand contact with things as the source of all knowl-
edge. Ideas are pale ghosts of flesh and blood impressions j
they are images, pallid reflections, dying echoes of first hand
intercourse with reality which takes place in sensation alone.

In spite of the polar opposition between the two schools,
they depend upon a common premise. According to both sys-
tems of philosophy, reflective thought, thinking that involves
Inference and judgment, is not originative. It has its test in
antecedent reality as that is disclosed in some non-reflective
immediate knowledge. Its validity depends upon the possi-
bility of checking its conclusions by identification with the
terms of such prior immediate knowledge. The controversy
between the schools is simply as to the organ and nature of
previous direct knowledge. To both schools, reflection, thought
involving inference, is reproductive j the "proof" of its results
is found in comparison with what is known without any infer-
ence. In traditional empiricism the test is found in sensory im-
pressions. For objective idealism, reflective inquiry is valid only
as it reproduces the work previously effected by constitutive
thought. The goal of human thinking is approximation to the
reality already instituted by absolute reason. The basic premise
is also shared by realists. The essence of their position is that

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

reflective inquiry is valid as it terminates in apprehension of
that which already exists. When thinking introduces any modi-
fication into antecedent reality it falls into error j in fact, pro-
ductive origination on the part of mind defines error.

The issue is connected with the analysis of experimental
knowing which was begun in the preceding chapter. For the
common premise of these philosophical schools, so opposed to
one another in most ways, goes back to adoption of the idea
about knowledge in relation to what is independently real
which, originating in Greek thought, has become engrained in
tradition. In our summary of the characteristics of experimental
thinking, its second trait was said to be the direction of experi-
ment by ideas, the fact that experiment is not random, aimless
action, but always includes, along with groping and relatively
blind doing, an element of deliberate foresight and intent,
which determines that one operation rather than another be
tried. In this chapter we shall, accordingly, consider the im-
plications for the theory of ideas that follow from experi-
mental method. Let us suppose, for the time being, that all
that we can know about ideas is derived from the way in which
they figure in the reflective inquiries of science. What con-
ception of their nature and office shall we then be led to form?

We shall begin, somewhat abruptly, with a statement of
the nature of conceptions which has been framed on the basis
of recent conclusions in physical science. We shall then com-
pare this idea about ideas with that which was embodied in
the Newtonian philosophy of nature and science, and take up
the reasons which compelled the abandonment of the latter.
Finally we shall recur to a comparison of the result reached
with the doctrine embodied in traditional philosophies one
that is identical with that found in the now discredited New-
tonian natural philosophy.

The position of present science on this matter has been

no

IDEAS AT WORK

stated as follows: "To find the length of an object, we have
to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length
is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is meas-
ured are fixed j that is, the concept of length involves as much
as and nothing more than the set of operations by which length
is determined. In general, we mean by any concept nothing
more than a set of operations} the concept is synonymous with
the corresponding set of operations" * The same idea is re-
peated by Eddington in his Gifford Lectures. His statement is
as follows: "The vocabulary of the physicist comprises a num-
ber of words such as length, angle, velocity, force, potential,
current, etc., which we call 'physical quantities.' It is now
recognized that these should be defined according to the way
in which we recognize them when actually confronted with
them, and not according to the metaphysical significance which
we may have anticipated for them. In the old text-books mass
was defined as 'quantity of matter' j but when it came to an
actual determination of mass, an experimental method was
prescribed which had no bearing on this definition." f The

*Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, New York, 1927, p. 5. The
italics are in the text.

t The Nature of the Physical World, London and New York, 1928, p. 255.
It is implied in the quotation that concepts are recognized by means of the
experimental operations by which they are determined; that is, operations
define and test the validity of the meanings by which we state natural happen-
ings. This implication is made explicit a few sentences further along when
in speaking of Einstein Mr. Eddington says his theory "insists that each
physical quantity should be defined as the result of certain operations of
measurement and calculation." The principle is anticipated in Peirce's essay on
How to Make Our Ideas Clear published as far back as 1881 now reprinted
in a volume of essays, edited by Morris R, Cohen, and entitled Chance, Love
and Logic, New York, 1923. Peirce states that the sole meaning of the idea
of an object consists of the consequences which result when the object is
acted upon in a particular way. The principle is one element in the pragma-
tism of James. The idea is also akin to the "instrumental" theory of concep-
tions, according to which they are intellectual instruments for directing our
activities in relation to existence. The principle of "extensive abstraction" as
a mode of defining things is similar in import. On account of ambiguities in
the notion of pragmatism although its logical import is identical I shall
follow Bridgman in speaking of "operational thinking."

Ill

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

adoption of this point of view with respect to the meaning
and content of thinking, and as to the validity or sound-
ness of the ideas by means of which we understand natural
events, makes possible what has been lacking throughout the
history of thought, a genuinely experimental empiricism. The
phrase "experimental empiricism" sounds redundant. It ought
to be so in fact, since the adjective and the noun should have
the same significance, so that nothing is gained by using the
two terms. But historically such is not the case. For, histori-
cally, empirical philosophies have been framed in terms of sen-
sations or sense data. These have been said to be the material
out of which ideas are framed and by agreement with which
they are to be tested. Sensory qualities are the antecedent
models with which ideas must agree if they are to be sound or
"proved." * These doctrines have always evoked an abundance
of criticisms. But the criticisms have taken the form of depre-
ciating the capacity of "experience" to provide the source and
test of our fundamentally important ideas in either knowledge
or morals. They have used the weaknesses of sensational em-
piricism to reinforce the notion that ideas are framed by rea-
son apart from any experience whatsoever; to support what is
known in the vocabulary of philosophical systems as an a priori
rationalism.

From the standpoint of the operational definition and tests
of ideas, ideas having an empirical origin and status. But it is
that of acts performed, acts in the literal and existential sense of
the word, deeds done, not reception of sensations forced on us
from without. Sensory qualities are important. But they are
intellectually significant only as consequences of acts inten-
tionally performed. A color seen at a particular locus in a spec-

*The whole empirical logic of Mill professedly, and as far as consistent
with itself, is an endeavor to show that all propositions involving reflection
and ideas must be proved, or demonstrated to be true, by reduction to propo-
sitions consisting only of material directly given in sensation.

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IDEAS AT WORK

tral band is, for example, of immense intellectual importance
in chemistry and in astro-physics. But merely as seen, as a bare
sensory quality, it is the same for the clodhopper and the
scientist j in either case, it is the product of a direct sensory
excitation} it is just and only another color the eye has hap-
pened upon. To suppose that its cognitive value can be eked
out or supplied by associating it with other sensory qualities
of the same nature as itself, is like supposing that by putting
a pile of sand in the eye we can get rid of the irritation caused
by a single grain. To suppose, on the other hand, that we must
appeal to a synthetic activity of an independent thought to
give the quality meaning in and for knowledge, is like suppos-
ing that by thinking in our heads we can convert a pile of
bricks into a building. Thinking, carried on inside the head, can
make some headway in forming the f)lan of a building. But it
takes actual operations to which the plan, as the fruit of
thought, gives instrumental guidance to make a building out
of separate bricks, or to transform an isolated sensory quality
into a significant clew to knowledge of nature.

Sensory qualities experienced through vision have their
cognitive status and office, not (as sensational empiricism holds)
in and of themselves in isolation, or as merely forced upon
attention, but because they are the consequences of definite
and intentionally performed operations. Only in connection
with the intent, or idea, of these operations do they amount to
anything, either as disclosing any fact or giving test and proof
of any theory. The rationalist school was right in as far as it
insisted that sensory qualities are significant for knowledge
only when connected by means of ideas. But they were wrong
in locating the connecting ideas in intellect apart from experi-
ence. Connection is instituted through operations which define
ideas, and operations are as much matters of experience as are
sensory qualities.

"3

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

It is not too much to say, therefore, that for the first time
there is made possible an empirical theory of ideas free from
the burdens imposed alike by sensationalism and a priori ra-
tionalism. This accomplishment is, I make bold to say, one of
three or four outstanding feats of intellectual history. For it
emancipates us from the supposed need of always harking back
to what has already been given, something had by alleged
direct or immediate knowledge in the past, for the test of the
value of ideas. A definition of the nature of ideas in terms
of operations to be performed and the test of the validity of
the ideas by the consequences of these operations establishes
connectivity within concrete experience. At the same time, by
emancipation of thinking from the necessity of testing its con-
clusions solely by reference to antecedent existence it makes
clear the originative possibilities of thinking.

John Locke has always been the central figure in the em-
pirical school. With extraordinary thoroughness he laid the
foundations of that empirical logic which tests the validity of
every belief about natural existence by the possibility of re-
solving the content of the belief into simple ideas originally
received through the senses. If we want to know what "solid-
ity" or any other idea is, we are, in his own words, "sent to the
senses." In developing this theory of the origin and test of
our natural knowledge (for he excepted mathematical and
moral ideas) he found himself building upon the foundation
laid by his illustrious contemporary, Sir Isaac Newton. The
latter was convinced of the unsoundness of the rationalistic
philosophy of science represented by Descartes, for a time the
great rival of Newton for supremacy in the scientific world.
Newton's own use of mathematics and also his conception of
gravitation (with some other of his physical ideas) exposed
him, however, to the charge of reviving the "occult essences"
of scholasticism. Accordingly, he was very emphatic upon the

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IDEAS AT WORK

point that he was thoroughly empirical in premises, method
and conclusions} empirical in that he had gone to his senses
and taken what he found there as the origin and justification
of his primary scientific ideas about nature. As we shall see,
certain assumptions of Newton were in fact far from empiri-
cal in any experimental sense of that word, but were intro-
duced by him into the philosophical foundations of natural
science and were thence taken over into the whole philosophic
theory of science to be questioned only in our own day.

No saying of Newton's is more widely known than that
"I do not invent hypotheses." This is only his negative way of
asserting complete reliance upon a subject-matter guaranteed
by the senses which in turn signifies, as we have just said,
that all scientific ideas go back to sense perceptions previously
had for both their origin and their warrant. We shall consider
first the effect of Newton's procedure upon the supposed foun-
dations of natural science, and then consider how the recogni-
tion of an operational and relational definition of scientific
conceptions instead of a discrete and sensory one has destroyed
those foundations.

While Newton employed mathematical conceptions with a
freedom equal to that of Descartes and with a heuristic power
far exceeding Descartes, he differentiated his own method
from that of the latter by insisting that the objects to which
his mathematical calculations applied were not products of
thought, but were given, as far as the properties which figured
in his science were concerned, in sense. That is, he did not claim
that he could sensibly observe the ultimate particles or atoms
which were the foundation of his system, but he did claim
that he had sensible grounds for assuming their existence, and
especially he insisted that all the properties with which his
scientific theory endowed these particles were derived from and
were verifiable in direct sense-perception. In his own words:

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

<c Whatever is not derived from phenomena is to be called a
hypothesis and hypotheses . . . have no place in experimen-
tal philosophy." The positive counterpart of this negative
statement is as follows: "The qualities of bodies which admit
of neither intension nor remission of degree and which are
found to belong to all bodies within the reach of experiments,
are to be assumed the universal qualities of all bodies whatso-
ever."

Newton's assumption that he was only extending to the
ultimate proper objects of physical science those qualities of
experienced objects that are disclosed in direct perception is
made evident by such passages as the following: "We no
other way know the extension of bodies than by our senses,
nor do these reach it in all bodies. But because we perceive
extension in all bodies that are sensible, therefore we ascribe it
universally to all others also. That abundance of bodies are
hard, we learn by experience j and because the hardness of the
whole arises from the hardness of the parts, we therefore
justly infer the hardness of the undivided particles not only of
the bodies we feel but of all others. That all bodies are im-
penetrable we gather not from reason but from sensation. . . .
That all bodies are moveable and are endued with certain
powers (which we call the vires inertiae) of persevering in
their motion or in their rest we only infer from like properties
observed in the bodies that we have seen." Or as Newton says
of his "principles," summing it all up: "I consider them not as
occult qualities but as general laws of nature . . . their truth
appearing to us by $henomena." The principles in question
were mass, gravity, hardness, impenetrability, extension, men
tion, inertia, etc.

The essential point of his argument is that non-sensible
bodies, namely, the ultimate particles to which mathematical
reasoning applies, are endowed with no properties save those

116

IDEAS AT WORK

which are found by experience to belong to all bodies of which
we do have sensible experience. The static (spatial, extension,
volume) qualities, and the dynamic properties (resistance, per-
severance in motion) of ultimate physical realities, are homo-
geneous with the common qualities of sensibly perceived
things. Color, sound, heat, odor, etc., go out, since they permit
of absence, and of remission and increase of degrees or are
not universally present. Volume, mass, inertia, motion and
moveability, remain as universal qualities. What would hap-
pen if some raised the objection that the existence of the ulti-
mate particles is hypothetical, since they are not observed?
What becomes of his empiricism even if the properties as-
scribed to particles are all sensibly verified, provided the bearers
of these properties are not observed? It can hardly be said
that Newton explicitly discusses this question. It seemed to
him practically self-evident that since sensible bodies were
divisible without losing the properties that form his "princi-
ples," we are entitled to assume the existence of certain last
particles of the same kind incapable of further division. And
while, in logical consistency, he could hardly have admitted the
argument, the fact that he found that he could "explain"
actual occurrences on the basis of this assumption seemed to
give him ample confirmation of their existence. Perhaps in the
following passage he comes as near as anywhere to dealing
explicitly with the point: After saying that if all particles, all
bodies whatever, were capable of being broken, they would
then wear away, he goes on to say that in that case the "nature
of things depending on them would be changed," and adds
"and therefore that nature may be lasting, the changes of cor-
poreal things are to be placed only in the various separations
and new associations and motions of these permanent particles."
"So that nature may be lasting!" It would be hard to find a
franker statement of the motive which controlled Newton's

117

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

doctrine. There was needed some guarantee that Nature would
not go to pieces and be dissipated or revert to chaos. How
could the unity of anything be secure unless there was some-
thing persistent and unchanging behind all change? Without
such fixed indissoluble unities, no final certainty was possible.
Everything was put in peril of dissolution. These metaphysi-
cal fears rather than any experimental evidence determined the
nature of the fundamental assumptions of Newton regarding
atoms. They furnished the premises which he regarded as
scientific and as the very foundations of the possibility of
science. "All changes are to be placed in only the separations
and new associations of permanent particles." In this state-
ment there is contained a professedly scientific restatement of
the old human desire for something fixed as the warrant and
object of absolute certainty. Without this fixity knowledge was
impossible. Changes are to be known by treating them as in-
different spatial approaches and withdrawals taking place be-
tween things that are themselves eternally the same. Thus to
establish certainty in existence and in knowledge, "God in the
beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable
particles, "

It was logically inevitable that as science proceeded on its
experimental path it would sooner or later become clear that
all conceptions, all intellectual descriptions, must be formu-
lated in terms of operations, actual or imaginatively possible.
There are no conceivable ways in which the existence of ulti-
mate unchangeable substances which interact without under-
going change in themselves can be reached by means of
experimental operations. Hence they have no empirical, no ex-
perimental standing j they are pure dialectic inventions: They
were not even necessary for application of the mathematical
method of Newton. Most of his analytic work in his Prin-
ciples would remain unchanged, if his physical particles were

118

IDEAS AT WORK

dropped out and geometrical points were substituted. What
reason can be assigned for Newton's desertion of an experi-
mental method and for the adoption in its stead of an obvi-
ously dialectical conception since the conception that the per-
manence of nature depends upon the assumption of a plurality
of discrete immutable substances is clearly dialectical? Doubt-
less in part the reason was that the scheme worked or seemed
to work. Without developing or acknowledging the conse-
quences of this mode of justification, objections based on theory
could always be met by pointing to the marvelous conclusions
of physical inquiry.

But a more fundamental reason was that the minds of
men, including physical inquirers, were still possessed by the
old notion that reality in order to be solid and firm must con-
sist of those fixed immutable things which philosophy calls
substances. Changes could be known only if they could be
somehow reduced to recombinations of original unchanging
things. For these alone can be objects of certainty the chang-
ing is as such the uncertain and only the certain and exact is
knowledge. Thus a popular metaphysics, given rational for-
mulation by the Greeks, and taken over into the intellectual
tradition of the western world, controlled at first the inter-
pretations placed upon the procedures and conclusions of ex-
perimental knowing.

This hypothesis as to the origin of the non-experimental
factor in the Newtonian philosophy is confirmed by his own
use of the metaphysics of the ideas of substance and essential
properties. The fact that Newton adopted the Democritean
rather than the Aristotelian conception of substance is of course
of immense importance scientifically. But philosophically
speaking it is of slight import compared with the fact that he
followed the supposed necessities of dialectic reasoning rather
than the lead of experienced subject-matter in accepting with-

119

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

out question the notion that there must be at the foundation of
all existence certain things which are intrinsically unchange-
able, and that such immutable entities are the objects of
any true knowledge because they give the warrant of fixed
certitude.

With his acceptance of the old doctrines of substances goes
that of the doctrine of essence. If fixed unchangeable things
exist, they must have certain inherent, unchangeable proper-
ties. Changes are accidental and external j they occur between
substances and do not affect their inner nature. If they did,
substances would not be substances j they would change and
rot away. Hence, in spite of starting upon the experimental
and mathematical path, Newtonian science kept the idea that
atoms are characterized by eternal properties or qualities, that
is by essences. Substances are "solid, hard, massy, impenetrable,
moveable particles." Their essence is precisely these unchange-
able, fixed qualities of solidity, mass, motion, inertia.

It thus appears that Newton retained a part of the qualita-
tive equipment of the objects of Greek science, in spite of their
irrelevance to both mathematics and experiment. When one
searches through philosophical commentary and discussion
(based mainly on Locke's version of Newton's results), one
finds a great deal of discussion about the fact that the so-
called secondary qualities, color, sound, odor, taste, were elimi-
nated from "reality." But not a word as far as I can discover is
said about the fact that other sensible qualities under the name
of primary were retained in defining the object of science.
And yet this retention is the fons et origo malorum. The actual
fact was that science by means of its operational conceptions
was instituting as its objects of thought things in a dimension
different from any of the direct qualities of objects. It was
not a question of getting rid of some immediate sense qualities j
but of a treatment indifferent to any and all qualities. New-

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IDEAS AT WORK

ton could not realize this fact, because he insisted that the
existence of hard and fixed unchanging substances was the basis
of science. Given such substances they had to have some quali-
ties as their inherent properties.

Hence Newton generously endowed them with those prop-
erties which he insisted were directly taken from sense experi-
ence itself. Consider the consequences for subsequent thought.
Getting rid of some qualities which had been regarded as
essential to natural things while retaining others, did not for-
ward in the least the actual work of science, while it did work
inevitably to establish a fixed gulf and opposition between
the things of ordinary perception, use and enjoyment and
the objects of science which, according to tradition, were the
only ultimately "real" objects. The story of the extent to
which this opposition became the underlying problem of mod-
ern philosophy need not be retold. Nor are we called upon
here to consider the way in which it generated an "epistemo-
logical" problem of knowledge in the general terms of rela-
tion of subject and object, as distinct from the logical problem
of the methods by which inquiry shall attain understanding.
For qualities expelled from scientific objects were given an
asylum "in the mind"j they became mental and psychical in
nature, and the problem arose how mind composed of such
elements, having nothing in common with objects of science
by doctrinal definition the real things of nature could pos-
sibly reach out and know their own opposites. In another con-
nection, that result would provide a theme most important to
discuss: from its origin in Berkeley's contention that since
"secondary" qualities are avowedly mental and since primary
qualities cannot be disassociated from them, the latter must
be mental also, through all the sinuosities of modern thought
in dealing with the "problem." But the first of these points,
the rivalry of scientific objects and empirical objects for posi-

121

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

tion in natural existence, has already been dealt with and the
latter problem is not immediately relevant.

We are here concerned with the Newtonian assumption
that we must carry over into the conception and definition of
physical objects some of the qualities directly experienced in
sense-perception, while their presence in such sense-experi-
ence is the warrant or "proof" of their validity as ideas. There
was no direct experience of the ultimate massy, hard, impene-
trable and indivisible and hence unchangeable particles since
indeed their eternal permanence obviously was a thing incap-
able of any experience except by some equally eternal mind.
Hence these qualities must be thought, they must be inferred.
In themselves they exist by themselves. But for us, they exist
as objects of thought only. Hence as ideas they need a warrant
and justification which primary qualities of immediate percep-
tion do not need, since these are self-warranting according to
the doctrine.

Now so deeply engrained are the conclusions of the old
tradition of rationalism versus (sensationalistic) empiricism,
that the question will still be raised: What other certification
could be given or can now be given for the properties of scien-
tific physical objects save by inferential extension of the uni-
versally found properties of all objects of sense perception?
Is there any alternative unless we are prepared to fall back
upon a 'priori rational conceptions supposed to bring their own
sufficient authority with them?

It is at this point that the recent recognition that the con-
ceptions by which we think scientific objects are derived neither
from sense nor from a priori conceptions has its logical and
philosophical force. Sense qualities, as we saw in the previous
chapter, are something to be known, they are challenges to
knowing, setting problems for investigation. Our scientific
knowledge is something about them, resolving the problems

122

IDEAS AT WORK

they propose. Inquiry proceeds by reflection, fcy thinking;
but not, most decidedly, by thinking as conceived in the old
tradition, as something cooped up within "mind." For ex-
perimental inquiry or thinking signifies directed activity y doing
something which varies the conditions under which objects
are observed and directly had and by instituting new arrange-
ments among them. Things perceived suggest to us (originally
just evoke or stimulate) certain ways of responding to them,
of treating them. These operations have been continuously
refined and elaborated during the history of man on earth,
although it is only during the last few centuries that the
whole affair of controlled thinking and of its issue in genuine
knowledge, has been seen to be bound up with their selection
and determination.

The central question thus arises: What determines the
selection of operations to be performed? There is but one an-
swer: the nature of the problem to be dealt with an answer
which links the phase of experiment now under discussion
with that considered in the last chapter. The first effect of
experimental analysis is, as we saw, to reduce objects directly
experienced to data. This resolution is required because the
objects in their first mode of experience are perplexing, ob-
scure, fragmentary} in some way they fail to answer a need.
Given data which locate the nature of the problem, there is
evoked a thought of an operation which if put into execution
may eventuate in a situation in which the trouble or doubt
which evoked inquiry will be resolved. If one were to trace the
history of science far enough, one would reach a time in which
the acts which dealt with a troublesome situation would be
organic responses of a structural type together with a few
acquired habits. The most elaborate technique of present in-
quiry in the laboratory is an extension and refinement of these
simple original operations. Its development has for the most

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

part depended upon the utilization of physical instruments,
which when inquiry was developed to a certain point were
purposely invented. In principle, the history of the construc-
tion of suitable operations in the scientific field is not different
from that of their evolution in industry. Something needed
to be done to accomplish an endj various devices and methods
of operation were tried. Experiences of success and failure
gradually improved the means used. More economical and
effective ways of acting were found that is, operations which
gave the desired kind of result with greater ease, less irrele-
vancy and less ambiguity, greater security. Each forward step
was attended with making better tools. Often the invention
of a tool suggested operations not in mind when it was in-
vented and thus carried the perfecting of operations still fur-
ther. There is thus no a priori test or rule for the determina-
tion of the operations which define ideas. They are themselves
experimentally developed in the course of actual inquiries.
They originated in what men naturally do and are tested and
improved in the course of doing.

This is as far as the answer to the query can be carried in
a formal way. Consequences that successfully solve the prob-
lems set by the conditions which give rise to the need of
action supply the basis by means of which acts, originally
"naturally 5 ' performed, become the operations of the art of
scientific experimentation. In content, a much more detailed
answer can be given. For this answer, one would turn to the
historical development of science, in which is recorded what
kind of operations have definitely been found to effect the
transformation of the obscure and perplexing situations of
experience into clear and resolved situations. To go into this
matter would be to expound the character of the concepts
actually employed in the best developed branches of reflec-
tion or inquiry.

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IDEAS AT WORK

While such a discussion is apart from our purpose, there
is one common character of all such scientific operations which
it is necessary to note. They are such as disclose relationships. A
simple case is the operation by which length is defined by one
object placed end upon end upon another object so many
times. This type of operation, repeated under conditions them-
selves defined by specified operations, not merely fixes the
relation of two things to each other called their length, but
defines a generalized concept of length. This conception in
connection with other operations, such as those which define
mass and time, become instruments by means of which a
multitude of relations between bodies can be established. Thus
the conceptions which define units of measurement of space,
time and motion become the intellectual instrumentalities by
which all sorts of things with no qualitative similarity with
one another can be compared and brought within the same
system. To the original gross experience of things there is
superadded another type of experience, the product of deliber-
ate art, of which relations rather than qualities are the signifi-
cant subject-matter. These connections are as much experi-
enced as are the qualitatively diverse and irreducible objects
of original natural experiences.

Qualities present themselves as just what they are, stati-
cally demarcated from one another. Moreover, they rarely
change, when left to themselves, in such ways as to indicate
the interactions or relations upon which their occurrence de-
pends. No one ever observed the production of the thing having
the properties of water, nor the mode of generation of a flash of
lightning. In sensory perception the qualities are either too
static or too abruptly discrete to manifest the specific connections
that are involved in their coming into existence. Intentional
variation of conditions gives an idea of these connections.
Through thought of them the things are understood or truly

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

known. Only slowly, however, did there dawn the full import
of the scientific method. For a long time the definitions were
supposed to be made not in terms of relations but through
certain properties of antecedent things. The space, time and
motion of physics were treated as inherent properties of Be-
ing, instead of as abstracted relations. In fact, two phases of
inquiry accompany each other and correspond to each other.
In one of these phases, everything in qualitative objects ex-
cept their happening is ignored, attention being paid to quali-
ties only as signs of the nature of the particular happening
in question: that is, objects are treated as events. In the other
phase, the aim of inquiry is to correlate events with one an-
other. Scientific conceptions of space, time and motion consti-
tute the generalized system of these correlations of events.
Thus they are doubly dependent upon operations of experi-
mental art: upon those which treat qualitative objects as events,
and upon those which connect events thus determined with one
another.

In these statements we have, however, anticipated the
actual movement of scientific thought. This took a long time
to arrive at recognition of its own import. Till our own day,
scie/ntific conceptions were interpreted in the light of; the
old belief that conceptions to be valid must correspond to ante-
cedent intrinsic properties resident in objects dealt with. Cer-
tain properties regarded by Newton as inherent in substances
and essential to them, in independence of connectivity, were
indeed speedily seen to be relations. This conversion hap-
pened first as to hardness and impenetrability, which were
seen to be reducible to mass. Vis inertiae was a measure of
mass. By careful thinkers "force" was treated as a measure
of acceleration and so a name for a relation, not as an inherent
property of an isolated thing by virtue of which one thing
could compel another to change. Nevertheless, until the pro-

126

IDEAS AT WORK

mulgation of Einstein's restricted theory of relativity, mass,
time and motion were regarded as intrinsic properties of ulti-
mate fixed and independent substances.

We shall postpone till later consideration of the circum-
stances attending the change. We are here concerned with
the fact that when it took place it was, in spite of its upset-
ting effects upon the foundation of the Newtonian philosophy
of science and of nature, from the logical point of view only
a clear acknowledgment of what had all the time been the
moving principle of the development of scientific method. To
say this is not to disparage the scientific importance of the
discovery that mass varies with velocity and of the result of
the Michelson-Morley experiment on the velocity of light.
Such discoveries were doubtless necessary in order to force
recognition of the operational or relational character of scien-
tific conceptions. And yet, logically, the way in which space,
time and motion, with their various functions, appear in mathe-
matical equations and are translated into equivalent formula-
tions with respect to one another something which is impos-
sible for qualities as such indicates that a relational treat-
ment had always been involved. But the imagination of men
had become used to ideas framed on the pattern of large
masses and relatively slow velocities. It required observation
of changes of high velocity, as of light over great distances,
and of minute changes occurring at infinitesimal distances to
emancipate imagination from its acquired habitudes. The dis-
covery that mass varies with velocity did away with the pos-
sibility of continuing to suppose that mass is the defining
characteristic of things in isolation from one another such
isolation being the sole condition under which mass could be
regarded as immutable or fixed.

The difference made in the actual content of scientific
theory is of course enormous. Yet it is not so great as the

127

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

difference made in the logic of scientific knowledge, nor as in
philosophy. With the surrender of unchangeable substances
having properties fixed in isolation and unaffected by inter-
actions, must go the notion that certainty is attained by attach-
ment to fixed objects with fixed characters. For not only are
no such objects found to exist, but the very nature of ex-
perimental method, najmely, definition by operations that are
interactions, implies that such things are not capable of being
known. Henceforth the quest for certainty becomes the search
for methods of control j that is, reguktion of conditions of
change with respect to their consequences.

Theoretical certitude is assimilated to practical certainty j
to security y trustworthiness of instrumental operations. "Real"
things may be as transitory as you please or as lasting in time
as you please; these are specific differences like that between
a flash of lightning and the history of a mountain range. In
any case they are for knowledge "events" not substances. What
knowledge is interested in is the correlation* among these
changes or events which means in effect that the event
called the mountain range must be placed within a system
consisting of a vast multitude of included events. When these
correlations are discovered, the possibility of control is in our
hands. Scientific objects as statements of these inter-relations
are instrumentalities of control. They are objects of the thought
of reality, not disclosures of immanent properties of real sub-
stances. They are in particular the thought of reality from a
particular point of view: the most highly generalized view of
nature as a system of interconnected changes.

Certain important conclusions follow. The test of the
validity of ideas undergoes a radical transformation. In the
Newtonian scheme, as in the classic tradition, this test resided
in properties belonging to ultimate real objects in isolation
from one another, and hence fixed or unchanging. According

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IDEAS AT WORK

to experimental inquiry, the validity of the object of thought
depends upon the consequences of the operations which define
the object of thought. For example, colors are conceived in
terms of certain numbers. The conceptions are valid in the
degree in which, by means of these numbers, we can predict
future events, and can regulate the interactions of colored
bodies as signs of changes that take place. The numbers are
signs or clues of intensity and direction of changes going on.
The only things relevant to the question of their validity is
whether they are dependable signs. That heat is a mode of
motion does not signify that heat and cold as qualitatively
experienced are "unreal," but that the qualitative experience
can be treated as an event measured in terms of units of
velocity of movement, involving units of position and time,
so that it can be connected with other events or changes simi-
larly formulated. The test of the validity of any particular
intellectual conception, measurement or enumeration is func-
tional, its use in making possible the institution of interactions
which yield results in control of actual experiences of observed
objects.

In contrast with this fact, in the Newtonian philosophy
measurements are important because they were supposed to
disclose just how much of a certain property belonged to some
body as its own isolated and intrinsic property. Philosophi-
cally, the effect of this view was to reduce the "reality" of
objects to just such mathematical and mechanical properties
hence the philosophical "problem" of the relation of real
physical objects to the objects of experience with their qualities
and immediate values of enjoyment and use. Mr. Eddington
has said that "the whole of our physical knowledge is based
on measures," and that "whenever we state the properties of
a body in terms of physical quantities, we are imparting the
responses of various metrical indicators to its presence, and

129

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

nothing more." * His graphic illustration of the physical for-
mulation of what happens when an elephant slides downhill
comes t6 mind. The mass of the elephant is the reading of a
pointer on a weighing scale j the slope of the hill, the reading
of a plumb line against the divisions of a protractor} bulk, a
series of readings on the scale of a pair of calipers j color, read-
ings of a photometer for light j the duration of the slide, a
series of readings on a watch dial, etc.

It seems almost too obvious for mention that a scientific
object consisting of a set of measurements of relations be-
tween two qualitative objects, and itself accordingly non-
qualitative, cannot possibly be taken, or even mis-taken, for a
new kind of "real" object which is a rival to the "reality" of
the ordinary object. But so loath are we to surrender tradi-
tional conceptions and unwilling as philosophers to surrender
as unreal problems which have long engaged attention, that
even Mr. Eddington feels called upon to reclothe these scien-
tific measured relations with qualities as something which
"mind" mysteriously introduced! Prisoners in jails are often
given numbers and are "known" by the numbers assigned. It
has not yet occurred to any one that these numbers are the real
prisoners, and that there is always a duplicate real object j one a
number, and the other a flesh and blood person, and that these
two editions of reality have to be reconciled. It is true that the
numbers which constitute by means of measurements the object
of scientific thought are not assigned so arbitrarily as those of
prisoners, but there is no difference in philosophical principle.
Incidentally, Mr. Eddington remarks in his discussion of
the metric properties of the object of thought that a knowl-
edge of all possible responses of a concrete thing as measured
by suitable devices "would completely determine its relation to
its environment" The relations a thing sustains are hardly a

The Nature of the Physical World, pp, 152 and 257.

130

IDEAS AT WORK

competitor to the thing itself. Put positively, the physical ob-
ject, as scientifically defined, is not a duplicated real object,
but is a statement, as numerically definite as is possible, of the
relations between sets of changes the qualitative object sus-
tains with changes in other things ideally of all things with
which interaction might under any circumstances take place.

Since these correlations are what physical inquiry does
know, it is fair to conclude that they are what it intends or
means to know: on analogy with the legal maxim that any
reasonable person intends the reasonably probable consequences
of what he does. We come back again to the frequently re-
peated statement that the problem which has given so much
trouble to modern philosophy that of reconciling the reality
of the physical object of science with the richly qualitative
object of ordinary experience, is a factitious one. All that is
required in order to apprehend that scientific knowledge as a
mode of active operation is a potential ally of the modes of
action which sustain values in existence, is to surrender the
traditional notion that knowledge is possession of the inner
nature of things and is the only way in which they may be
experienced as they "really" are.

For if one change is correlated definitely with others it
can be employed as an indication of their occurrence. Seeing
one thing happen we can promptly infer upon what it depends,
and what needs to be reinforced or to be weakened if its pres-
ence is to be made more secure or is to be done away with. In
itself, the object is just what it is experienced as being, hard,
heavy, sweet, sonorous, agreeable or tedious and so on. But
in being "there" these traits are effects, not causes. They
cannot as such be used as means, and when they are set up as
ends in view, we are at a loss how to secure them. For just
as qualities there are no constant and definite relations which
can be ascertained between them and other things. If we wish

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

to regard them not as fixed properties but as things to be
attained, we must be able to look upon them as dependent
events. If we wish to be able to judge how they may be at-
tained, we must connect them as changes with other changes
more nearly in our power, until by means of a transitive series
of connected changes we arrive at that which we can initiate
by our own acts. If one with understanding of the whole
situation were to set out to devise means of control of the
experience of qualitative values, he would plot a course which
would be identical with that followed by experimental science j
one in which the results of knowledge would bear the same
relation to acts to be performed as do those of actual physical
knowledge.

Ability, through a definite or measured correktion of
changes, to connect one with another as sign or evidence is
the precondition of control. It does not of itself provide direct
control} reading the index hand of a barometer as a sign of
probable rain does not enable us to stop the coming of the
rain. But it does enable us to change our relations to it: to
plant a garden, to carry an umbrella on going out, to direct
the course of a vessel at sea, etc. It enables preparatory acts
to be undertaken which make values less insecure. If it does
not enable us to regulate just what is to take place, it enables
us to direct some phase of it in a way which influences the
stability of purposes and results. In other cases, as in the arts
proper, we can not only modify our own attitude so as to effect
useful preparation for what is to happen, but we can modify
the happening itself. This use of one change or perceptible
occurrence as a sign of others and as a means of preparing our-
selves, did not wait for the development of modern science.
It is as old as man himself, being the heart of all intelligence.
But accuracy and scope of such judgments, which are the only
means with power to direct the course of events and to effect

132

IDEAS AT WORK

the security of values, depends upon the use of methods such
as modern physics has made available.

Extent of control is dependent, as was suggested a moment
ago, upon capacity to find a connected series of correlated
change, such that each linked pair leads on to another in the
direction of a terminal one which can be brought about by our
own action. It is this latter condition which is especially ful-
filled by the objects of scientific thought. Physical science dis-
regards the qualitative heterogeneity of experienced objects so
as to make them all members in one comprehensive homo-
geneous scheme, and hence capable of translation or conver-
sion one into another. This homogeneity of subject-matter
over a broad range of things which are as disparate from each
other in direct experience as sound and color, heat and light,
friction and electricity, is the source of the wide and free con-
trol of events found in modern technology. Common sense
knowledge can connect things as sign and thing indicated here
and there by isolated couples. But.it cannot possibly join them
all up together so that we can pass from any one to any other.
The homogeneity of scientific objects, through formulation in
terms of relations of space, time and motion, is precisely the
device which makes this indefinitely broad and flexible scheme
of transitions possible. The meaning which one event has is
translatable into the meanings which others possess. Ideas of
objects, formulated in terms of the relations which changes
bear to one another, having common measures, institute broad,
smooth highways by means of which we can travel from the
thought of one part of nature to that of any other. In ideal
at least, we can travel from any meaning or relation found
anywhere in nature to the meaning to be expected anywhere
else.

We have only to compare thinking and judging objects
in terms of these measured interactions with the classic scheme

133

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

of a hierarchy of species and genera to see the great gain that
has been effected. It is the very nature of fixed kinds to be as
exclusive with respect to those of a different order as it is to be
inclusive with respect to those which fall within the class.
Instead of a thoroughfare from one order to another, there
was a sign: No passage. The work of emancipation which was
initiated by experimentation, setting objects free from limita-
tion by old habits and customs, reducing them to a collection of
data forming a problem for inquiry, is perfected by the method
of conceiving and defining objects through operations which
have as their consequence accurate metric statements of changes
correlated with changes going on elsewhere.

The resolution of objects and nature as a whole into facts
stated exclusively in terms of quantities which may be handled
in calculation, such as saying that red is such a number of
changes while green is another, seems strange and puzzling
only when we fail to appreciate what it signifies. In reality, it
is a declaration that this is the effective way to think things j
the effective mode in which to frame ideas of them, to formu-
late their meanings. The procedure does not vary in principle
from that by which it is stated that an article is worth so
many dollars and cents. The latter statement does not say
that the article is literally or in its ultimate "reality" so many
dollars and cents j it says that for purpose of exchange that is
the way to think of it, to judge it. It has many other mean-
ings and these others are usually more important inherently.
But with respect to trade, it is what it is worth, what it will sell
for, and the price value put upon it expresses the relation it
bears to other things in exchange. The advantage in stating
its worth in terms of an abstract measure of exchange such as
money, instead of in terms of the amount of corn, potatoes
or some other special thing it will exchange for, is that the
latter method is restricted and the former generalized. De-

134

IDEAS AT WORK

velopment of the systems of units by which to measure sensible
objects (or form ideas of them) has come along with dis-
covery of the ways in which the greatest amount of free move-
ment from one conception to another is possible.

The formulation of ideas of experienced objects in terms
of measured quantities, as these are established by an inten-
tional art or technique, does not say that this is the way they
must be thought, the only valid way of thinking them. It
states that for the purpose of generalized, indefinitely exten-
sive translation from one idea to another, this is the way to
think them. The statement is like any other statement about
instruments, such as that so-and-so is the best way of sending
a number of telegraphic dispatches simultaneously. As far as it
is actually the best instrumentality, the statement is correct. It
has to be proved by working better than any other agency j it is
in process of continuous revision and improvement. For pur-
poses except that of general and extensive translation of one
conception into another, it does not follow that the "scientific"
way is the best way of thinking an affair. The nearer we come
to an action that is to have an individualized unique object
of experience for its conclusion, the less do we think the
things in question in these exclusively metric terms. The physi-
cian in practice will not think in terms as general and abstract
as those of the physiologist in the laboratory, nor the engineer
in the field in those as free from special application as will
the physicist in his work-shop. There are many ways of think-
ing things in relation to one another j they are, as conceptions,
instruments. The value of an instrument depends upon what
is to be done with it. The fine scale micrometer which is indis-
pensable in the successful performance of one operation would
be a hindrance in some other needed actj and a watch spring
is useless to give elasticity to a mattress.

There is something both ridiculous and disconcerting in the

135

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

way in which men have let themselves be imposed upon, so
as to infer that scientific ways of thinking of objects give the
inner reality of things, and that they put a mark of spurious-
ness upon all other ways of thinking of them, and of perceiv-
ing and enjoying them. It is ludicrous because these scientific
conceptions, like other instruments, are hand-made by man in
pursuit of realization of a certain interest that of the maxi-
mum convertibility of every object of thought into any and
every other. It is a wonderful ideal j the ingenuity which man
has shown in devising means of realizing the interest is even
more marvelous. But these ways of thinking are no more
rivals of or substitutes for objects as directly perceived and
enjoyed than the power-loom, which is a more effective in-
strument for weaving cloth than was the old hand-loom, is a
substitute and rival for cloth. The man who is disappointed
and tragic because he cannot wear a loom is in reality no more
ridiculous than are the persons who feel troubled because the
objects of scientific conception of natural things have not the
same uses and values as the things of direct experience.

The disconcerting aspect of the situation resides in the
difficulty with which mankind throws off beliefs that have be-
come habitual. The test of ideas, of thinking generally, is
found in the consequences of the acts to which the ideas lead,
that is in the new arrangements of things which are brought
into existence. Such is the unequivocal evidence as to the worth
of ideas which is derived from observing their position and
role in experimental knowing. But tradition makes the tests
of ideas to be their agreement with some antecedent state of
things. This change of outlook and standard from what pre-
cedes to what comes after, from the retrospective to the pros-
pective, from antecedents to consequences, is extremely hard
to accomplish. Hence when the physical sciences describe ob-
jects and the world as being such and such, it is thought that

136

IDEAS AT WORK

the description is of reality as it exists in itself. Since all value-
traits are lacking in objects as science presents them to us, it
is assumed that Reality has not such characteristics.

In the previous chapter, we saw that experimental method,
in reducing objects to data, divests experienced things of their
qualities, but that this removal, judged from the standpoint
of the whole operation of which it is one part, is a condition
of the control which enables us to endow the objects of ex-
perience with other qualities which we want them to have. In
like fashion, thought, our conceptions and ideas, are designa-
tions of operations to be performed or already performed.
Consequently their value is determined by the outcome of
these operations. They are sound if the operations they direct
give us the results which are required. The authority of
thought depends upon what it leads us to through directing
the performance of operations. The business of thought is not
to conform to or reproduce the characters already possessed
by objects but to judge them as potentialities of what they
become through an indicated operation. This principle holds
from the simplest case to the most elaborate. To judge that
this object is sweet, that is, to refer the idea or meaning "sweet"
to it without actually experiencing sweetness, is to predict that
when it is tasted that is, subjected to a specified operation
a certain consequence will ensue. Similarly, to think of the
world in terms of mathematical formulae of space, time and
motion is not to have a picture of the independent and fixed
essence of the universe. It is to describe experienceable objects
as material upon which certain operations are performed.

The bearing of this conclusion upon the relation of knowl-
edge and action speaks for itself. Knowledge which is merely
a reduplication in ideas of what exists already in the world
may afford us the satisfaction of a photograph, but that is all.
To form ideas whose worth is to be judged by what exists

137

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

independently of them is not a function that (even if the
test could be applied, which seems impossible) goes on within
nature or makes any difference there. Ideas that are plans
of operations to be performed are integral factors in actions
which change the face of the world. Idealistic philosophies
have not been wrong in attaching vast importance and power to
ideas. But in isolating their function and their test from
action, they failed to grasp the point and place where ideas
have a constructive office. A genuine idealism and one com-
patible with science will emerge as soon as philosophy accepts
the teaching of science that ideas are statements not of what is
or has been but of acts to be performed. For then mankind will
learn that, intellectually (that is, save for the esthetic enjoy-
ment they afford, which is of course a true value), ideas are
worthless except as they pass into actions which rearrange and
reconstruct in some way, be it little or large, the world in
which we live. To magnify thought and ideas for their own
sake apart from what they do (except, once more, estheti-
cally) is to refuse to learn the lesson of the most authentic
kind of knowledge the experimental and it is to reject the
idealism which involves responsibility. To praise thinking above
action because there is so much ill-considered action in the
world is to help maintain the kind of a world in which action
occurs for narrow and transient purposes. To seek after ideas
and to cling to them as means of conducting operations, as
factors in practical arts, is to participate in creating a world
in which the springs of thinking will be clear and ever-flow-
ing. We recur to our general issue. When we take the instance
of scientific experience in its own field, we find that experience
when it is experimental does not signify the absence of large
and far-reaching ideas and purposes. It is dependent upon
them at every point. But it generates them within its own
procedures and tests them by its own operations. In so far,

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IDEAS AT WORK

we have the earnest of a possibility of human experience, in
all its phases, in which ideas and meanings will be prized and
will be continuously generated and used. But they will be
integral with the course of experience itself, not imported
from the external source of a reality beyond.

139

CHAPTER VI
THE PLAY OF IDEAS

THE PROBLEM OF the nature, office and test of ideas is not
exhausted in the matter of physical conceptions we have dis-
cussed in the preceding chapter. Mathematical ideas are in-
dispensable instruments of physical research, and no account
of the method of the latter is complete that does not take into
account the applicability of mathematical conceptions to natural
existence. Such ideas have always seemed to be the very type
of pure conceptions, of thought in its own nature unadulter-
ated with material derived from experience. To a constant
succession of philosophers, the role of mathematics in physical
analysis and formulation has seemed to be a proof of the
presence of an invariant rational element within physical ex-
istence, which is on that account something more than physical j
this role of conceptions has been the stumbling block of em-
piricists in trying to account for science on an empirical basis.
The significance of mathematics for philosophy is not con-
fined to this seemingly superphysical phase of the physical
world, and a superempirical factor in knowledge of it. Mathe-
matical conceptions as expressions of pure thought have also
seemed to provide the open gateway to a realm of essence that
is independent of existence, physical or mental a self-sub-
sisting realm of ideal and eternal objects which are the objects
of the highest that is, the most assured knowledge. As was
earlier noted, the Euclidean geometry was undoubtedly the
pattern for the development of a formally rational logic; it
was also a marked factor in leading Plato to his doctrine of a

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THE PLAY OF IDEAS

world of supersensible and superphysical ideal objects. The
procedure of mathematics has, moreover, always been the chief
reliance of those who have asserted that the demonstrated
validity of all reflective thinking depends upon rational truths
immediately known without any element of inference entering
in. For mathematics was supposed to rest upon a basis of first
truths or axioms, self-evident in nature, and needing only that
the eye of reason should fall upon them to be recognized for
what they are. The function of indemonstrables, of axioms and
definitions, in mathematical deduction has been the ground for
the distinction between intuitive and discursive reason, just as
deductions have been taken to be the convincing proof that
there is a realm of pure essences logically connected with
one another: universals having internal bonds with one
another.

The theory that conceptions are definitions of conse-
quences of operations needs therefore to be developed with
reference to mathematical ideas both for its own sake, and for
its bearing upon the philosophic issues which are basic to the
logic of rationalism and to the metaphysics of essences and
universals or invariants. We shall begin with mathematical
concepts in their physical sense, and then consider them as they
are developed apart from existential application. Although
Descartes defined natural existence as extension, the classic
tradition that only sense and imagination, among the organs
of mind, refer to physical existence caused him to feel bound
to offer justification for the doctrine that natural phenomena
can be scientifically stated by purely mathematical reasoning
without need of recourse to experimentation. His proof of the
existence of God served the purpose of justifying this appli-
cation of mathematical conceptions in physics. With Spinoza,
the correspondence between physical existence and ideas did
not need to be substantiated by God because it was God. This

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

correspondence when modified to give thought such a priority
as to include existence within itself became the animating motif
of Post-Kantian idealistic systems.

Newton, being a man of science rather than a professed
philosopher, made such assumptions as he thought scientific
procedure demanded and its conclusions warranted. The skepti-
cism of Hume (anticipated, however, by Berkeley as far as the
Newtonian metaphysics of mathematical space and time were
concerned) was, as is notorious, the chief factor in leading
Kant to regard space and time as a priori forms of all percep-
tual experience. One of the grounds for Kant's conviction that
his doctrine was inconvertible was because he thought it had
the support of Newtonian physics and was necessary to give
that physics a firm foundation.

The consideration important for our special purpose is,
however, the fact that Newton with respect to the doctrine of
space, time and motion (involved in all conception of things
dealt with in the universal physics of nature) frankly deserted
the empirical method he professed to use in respect to the
properties of the ultimate fixed substances. At the same time,
he regarded the physical and the mathematical as complemen-
tary conceptions of two sets of properties of fixed forms of im-
mutable Being. He assumed, in addition to atoms having mass,
inertia and extension, the existence of empty immaterial space
and time in which these substances lived, moved and had their
being. The combination of the properties of these two kinds
of Being provided the union of the empirically observed prop-
erties of phenomena with those that were rational and mathe-
matical: a union so complete and so intimate that it con-
ferred upon the Newtonian system that massive solidity and
comprehensiveness which seemed to render his system in its
essential framework the last word possible of the science of
nature.

THE PLAY OF IDEAS

Definition of space, time and motion from "the relation
they bear to sense" is according to him "a vulgar prejudice,"
As well as any contemporary physicist, he knew that phe-
nomena of space, time and motion in their perceived forms are
found in a frame of reference which is relative to an observer.
In escape from the relativity of observable traits of the spatial
and temporal motions of bodies, he assumed the existence of
a fixed container of empty space in which bodies are located and
an equably flowing time, empty in itself, in which changes
take place. From this assumption, it followed that atoms have
an intrinsically measurable motion of their own, independent
of any connection with an observer. Absolute space, time and
motion were thus the immutable frame within which all
particular phenomena take place.

The assumption of these rational absolutes was also re-
quired by his basic metaphysics of fixed substances having their
own inherent and unchangeable (or essential) properties of
mass, extension and inertia. The sole ground of assurance that
ultimate hard and massy particles persist without internal
change, that all changes are merely matters of their external
"separations and associations," was the existence of something
empty and fixed within which the latter occur. Without such
an intervening medium, interaction with one another would be
equivalent to internal changes in atoms. Space provided the
condition under which changes would be external and indif-
ferent to ultimate physical substances. Since, then, changes
have nothing to do directly with the relations of atoms to one
another, the temporal order of changes cannot be connected
with the atoms themselves. There must be some evenly flow-
ing external change in reality no change at all in reference
to which they have fixed positions of before and after and of
simultaneity. Since velocity and acceleration of observed mo-
tions would be disjoined from absolute position and date if

H3

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

they were relative to an observer to the disruption of the
whole physical scheme motion must also be absolute.

While professing empiricism, Newton thus got the benefit
of the rationalistic system of strict deductive necessity. In-
variant time, space and motion furnished phenomena those
properties to which mathematical reasoning could be attached
as a disclosure of inherent properties. The positions of bodies
could be treated as an assemblage of geometrical points and
the temporal properties of their motions be considered as if
they were mere instants. Everything observed had, in its
scientific treatment, to conform mathematically to specifications
laid down by the mathematics of space and time. Until our
own day, until the conception of the determination of simul-
taneity of occurrence was challenged by Einstein, the system
continued to receive at least Pickwickian assent from scientists.

There is no trouble of course about the determination of
simultaneity when two events occur within one and the same
region of observation. Newton, because of his assumption of
absolute time, assumed that the measurement of simultaneity
had precise meaning for events not occurring within the same
observed field. Einstein saw that this assumption was the
Achilles heel of the entire scheme. He demanded an experi-
mental method of determining simultaneity without which
events cannot be dated with respect to one another. He made
the demand not on purely general principles, but because of a
definite problem with relation to the velocity of light. For the
existing state of the doctrine of light presented a discrepancy
not to be resolved on the basis of the received scheme. The
observed constancy of light with reference to the place from
which its direction was observed and its velocity measured,
did not agree with a fundamental principle of dynamics} with
its postulate concerning frames of reference for coordinate
systems having uniform movements of translation. Instead of

144

THE PLAY OF IDEAS

maintaining the old theory and denying the validity of the
observed result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, Ein-
stein asked what change in conceptions was demanded by the
experimental result. He saw that the measurement of time
relations, centering in the concept of simultaneity, was the cru-
cial point.

So he said, "We require a definition of simultaneity such
that this definition supplies us with a method by which in 'par-
ticular cases the physicist cam decide by experiment whether or
not two events occurred simultaneously." * He suggested an
arrangement by which two flashes of light, not in themselves
capable of inclusion in one region of observation, be reflected
to a mirror placed midway between the origin of the two
flashes. They are simultaneous if they are then included within
one and the same act of observation. To a layman, the sug-
gestion might seem innocuous. But taken in its context, it
signified that the temporal relation of events was to be meas-
ured by means of the consequences of an operation which con-
stitutes as its outcome a single field of observed phenomena.
It signified, in connection with the fact regarding the constancy
of velocity of light, that events occurring at different times
according to two watches keeping exactly the same time, placed
at the points of the origin of the flashes, may be simultaneous.
In scientific content, this was equivalent to doing away with
Newton's absolutes j it was the source of the doctrine of
restricted relativity. It signified that local or individualized
times are not the same as a generic common time of physics:
in short, it signified that physical time designates a relation of
events, not the inherent property of objects.

What is significant for our purpose is that it marked the
end, as far as natural science is concerned, of the attempt to
frame scientific conceptions of objects in terms of properties
* Einstein, Relativity, New York, 1926, p. 26. Italics not in original.

H5

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

assigned to those objects independently of the observed conse-
quences of an experimental operation. Since the former doc-
trine about the proper way to form conceptions, to the effect
that agreement with antecedent properties determines the
value or validity of ideas, was the doctrine common to all
philosophic schools except the pragmatic one of Peirce the
logical and philosophical transformation thus affected may be
said to be more far-reaching than even the extraordinary de-
velopment in the content of natural science which resulted. It
is not too much to say that whatever should be future develop-
ments in discoveries about light, or that even if the details of
the Einstein theory of relativity should be some time dis-
credited, a genuine revolution, and one which will not go back-
ward, has been effected in the theory of the origin, nature and
test of scientific ideas.

In respect to the special theme of the nature of mathe-
matico-physical conceptions, the pertinent conclusion is evi-
dent. For the conclusion of Einstein, in eliminating absolute
space, time and motion as physical existences, does away with
the doctrine that statements of space, time and motion as they
appear in physics concern inherent properties. For that notion,
it compels the substitution of the notion that they designate
relations of events. As such relations, they secure, in their
generality, the possibility of linking together objects viewed
as events in a general system of linkage and translation. They
are the means of correlating observations made at different
times and places, whether by one observer or by many, so
that translations may be effected from one to another. In
short, they do the business that all thinking and objects of
thought have to effect: they connect, through relevant opera-
tions, the discontinuities of individualized observations and
experiences into continuity with one another. Their validity
is a matter of their efficacy in performance of this f unction j

146

THE PLAY OF IDEAS

it is tested by results and not by correspondence with antece-
dent properties of existence.

It is possible to extend this conclusion to logical forms in
general. The fact that there are certain formal conditions of
the validity of inference has been used as the ultimate war-
rant of a realm of invariant Being. But in analogy with the
conclusion regarding mathematical conceptions, logical forms
are statements of the means by which it is discovered that
various inferences may be translated into one another, or
made available with respect to one another, in the widest and
most secure way. Fundamentally, the needs satisfied by infer-
ence are not fully met as long as special instances are isolated
from one another.

The difference between the operational conception of con-
ceptions and the traditional orthodox one may be indicated by
an illustrative analogy.* A visitor to a country finds certain
articles used* for various purposes, rugs, baskets, spears, etc.
He may be struck by the beauty, elegance and order of their
designs, and, assuming a purely esthetic attitude toward them,
conclude that they are put to use only incidentally. He may
even suppose that their instrumental use marks a degradation
of their inherent nature, a concession to utilitarian needs and
conveniences. A "tough-minded" observer may be convinced
that they were intended to be put to use, and had been con-
structed for that purpose. He would, indeed, recognize that
there must have been raw materials which were inherently
adapted for conversion to such appliances. But he would not
on that account believe the things to be original instead of
being made articles} still less would he conceive them to be

*The phrase "conception of conceptions" is used to suggest that the
interpretation is self-applying: that is, the conception advanced is also a
designation of a method to be pursued. One may lead a horse to water but
cannot compel him to drink. If one is unable to perform an indicated operation
or declines to do so, he will not of course get its meaning.

H7

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

the original "realities" of which crude or raw material were
imitations or inadequate phenomenal exemplifications. As he
traced the history of these instrumentalities and found them
beginning in forms which were nearer to raw materials,
gradually being perfected in economy and efficiency, he would
conclude that the perfecting had been an accompaniment of
use for ends, changes being introduced to remedy deficiencies
in prior operations and results. His tender-minded companion
might, on the other hand, infer that the progressive develop-
ment showed that there was some original and transcendental
pattern which had been gradually approximated empirically,
an archetype laid up in the heavens.

One person might argue that, while the development of
designs had been a temporal process, it had been wholly deter-
mined by patterns of order, harmony and symmetry that have
an independent subsistence, and that the historic movement
was simply a piecemeal approximation to eternal patterns. He
might elaborate a theory of formal coherence of relations
having nothing to do with particular objects except that of
being exemplified in them. His tough-minded companion might
retort that any object made to serve a purpose must have a
definite structure of its own which demands an internal con-
sistency of parts in connection with one another, and that man-
made machines are typical examples j that while these cannot
be made except by taking advantage of conditions and relations
previously existing, machines and tools are adequate to their
function in the degree in which they produce rearrangement
of antecedent things so that they may work better for the need
in question. If speculatively inclined, he might wonder
whether our very ideals of internal order and harmony had
not themselves been formed under the pressure of constant
need of redisposing of things so that they would serve as
means for consequences. If not too tough-minded, he would

148

THE PLAY OF IDEAS

be willing to admit that after a certain amount of internal
rearrangement and organization had been effected under the
more direct pressure of demand for effective instrumentali-
ties, an enjoyed perception of internal harmony on its own
account would result, and that study of formal relations might
well give a clew to methods which would result in improve-
ment of internal design for its own sake with no reference
whatever to special further use.

Apart from metaphor, the existence of works of fine art,
of interest in making them and of enjoyment of them, affords
sufficient evidence that objects exist which are wholly "real"
and yet are man-made ; that making them must observe or
pay heed to antecedent conditions, and yet the objects intrin-
sically be redispositions of prior existence; that things as they
casually offer themselves suggest ends and enjoyments they
do not adequately realize; that these suggestions become defi-
nite in the degree they take the form of ideas, of indications
of operations to be performed in order to effect a desired
eventual rearrangement. These objects, when once in existence,
have their own characters and relations, and as such suggest
standards and ends for further production of works of art,
with less need for recourse to original "natural" objects; they
become as it were a "realm" having its own purposes and
regulative principles. At the same time, the objects of this
"realm" tend to become over-formal, stereotyped and "aca-
demic" if the internal development of an art is too much
isolated, so that there is recurrent need for attention to original
"natural" objects in order to initiate new significant move-
ments.

The notion that there are no alternatives with respect to
mathematical objects save that they form an independent
realm of essences; or are relations inherent in some antecedent
physical structure denominated space and timej or else are

149

[THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

mere psychological, "mental" things, has no support in fact.
The supposition that these alternatives are exhaustive is a
survival of the traditional notion that identifies thought and
ideas with merely mental acts that is, those inside mind.
Products of intentional operations are objectively real and
are valid if they meet the conditions involved in the intent
for the sake of which they are constructed. But human inter-
action is a contributing factor in their production, and they
have worth in the human use made of them.

The discussion so far does not, however, directly touch the
question of "pure" mathematics, mathematical ideas in them-
selves. Newton's mathematics was professedly a mathematics
of physical although non-material existence: of existential
absolute space, time and motion. Mathematicians, however,
often regard their distinctive conceptions as non-existential in
any sense. The whole tendency of later developments, which
it is unnecessary for our purposes to specify (but of which the
doctrine of n-dimensional "spaces" is typical), is to identify
pure mathematics with pure logic. Some philosophers employ
therefore the entities of pure mathematics so as to rehabilitate
the Platonic notion of a realm of essence wholly independent
of all existence whatever.

Does the doctrine of the operational and experimentally
empirical nature of conceptions break down when applied to
"pure" mathematical objects? The key to the answer is to be
found in a distinction between operations overtly performed
(or imagined to be performed) and operations symbolically
executed. When we act overtly, consequences ensue ; if we do
not like them, they are nevertheless there in existence. We
are entangled in the outcome of what we doj we have to stand
its consequences. We shall put a question that is so elementary
that it may seem silly. How can we have an end in view with-
out having an end, an existential result, in fact? With the

THE PLAY OF IDEAS

answer to this question is bound up the whole problem of
intentionl regulation of what occurs. For unless we can have
ends-in-view without experiencing them in concrete fact, no
regulation of action is possible. The question might be put
thus: How can we act without acting, without doing some-
thing?

If, by a contradiction in terms, it had been possible for
men to think of this question before they had found how to
answer it, it would have been given up as insoluble. How can
man make an anticipatory projection of the outcome of an
activity in such a way as to direct the performance of an act
which shall secure or avert that outcome? The solution must
have been hit upon accidentally as a by-product, and then
employed intentionally. It is natural to suppose that it came
as a product of social life by way of communication ; say, of
cries that having once directed activities usefully without in-
tent were afterwards used expressly for that purpose. But
whatever the origin, a solution was found when symbols came
into existence. By means of symbols, whether gestures, words
or more elaborate constructions, we act without acting. That
is, we perform experiments by means of symbols which have
results which are themselves only symbolized, and which do
not therefore commit us to actual or existential consequences.
If a man starts a fire or insults a rival, effects follow j the die
is cast. But if he rehearses the act in symbols in privacy, he
can anticipate and appreciate its result. Then he can act or not
act overtly on the basis of what is anticipated and is not there
in fact. The invention or discovery of symbols is doubtless by
far the single greatest event in the history of man. Without
them, no intellectual advance is possible j with them, there is
no limit set to intellectual development except inherent
stupidity.

For long ages, symbols were doubtless used to regulate

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

activity only ad hoc; they were employed incidentally and for
some fairly immediate end. Moreover, the symbols used at
first were not examined nor settled upon with respect to the
office they performed. They were picked up in a casual man-
ner from what was conveniently at hand. They carried all
sorts of irrelevant associations that hampered their efficacy in
their own special work. They were neither whittled down to
accomplish a single function nor were they of a character to
direct acts to meet a variety of situations: they were neither
definite nor comprehensive. Definition and generalization are
incompetent without invention of proper symbols. The loose
and restricted character of popular thinking has its origin in
these facts} its progress is encumbered by the vague and vac-
illating nature of ordinary words. Thus the second great step
forward was made when special symbols were devised that
were emancipated from the load of irrelevancy carried by
words developed for social rather than for intellectual pur-
poses, their meaning being helped out by their immediate
local context. This liberation from accidental accretions
changed clumsy and ambiguous instruments of thought into
sharp and precise tools. Even more important was the fact
that instead of being adapted to local and directly present
situations, they were framed in detachment from direct overt
use and with respect to one another. One has only to look at
mathematical symbols to note that the operations they desig-
nate are others of the same kind as themselves, that is, sym-
bolic not actual. The invention of technical symbols marked
the possibility of an advance of thinking from the common
sense level to the scientific.

The formation of geometry by the Greeks is probably that
which historically best illustrates the transition. Before this
episode, counting and measuring had been employed for "prac-
tical" ends, that is, for uses directly involved in nearby situa-

152

THE PLAY OF IDEAS

tions. They were restricted to particular purposes. Yet having
been invented and having found expression in definite sym-
bols, they formed, as far as they went, a subject-matter
capable of independent examination. New operations could be
performed upon them. They could, and in no disrespectful
sense, be played with; they could be treated from the stand-
point of a fine art rather than from that of an immediately
useful economic craft. The Greeks with their dominant esthetic
interest were the ones who took this step. Of the creation by
the Greeks of geometry it has been said that it was stimulated
a by the art of designing, guided by an esthetic application of
symmetrical figures. The study of such figures, and the experi-
mental construction of tile figures, decorative borders, con-
ventional sculptures, moldings and the like had made the early
Greeks acquainted not only with a great variety of regular
geometrical forms, but with techniques by which they could
be constructed, compounded and divided exactly, in various
ways. Unlike their predecessors, the Greeks made an intel-
lectual diversion of all they undertook." Having discovered
by trial and error a large number of interrelated properties
of figures, they proceeded to correlate these with one another
and with new ones. They effected this work "in ways which
gradually eliminated from their thought about them all guess-
work, all accidental experiences such as errors of actual draw-
ing and measurement, and all ideas except those which were
absolutely essential. Their science thus became a science of
ideas exclusively."*

The importance of the intellectual transition from con-
crete to abstract is generally recognized. But it is often mis-
conceived. It is not infrequently regarded as if it signified
simply the selection by discriminative attention of some one
quality or relation from a total object already sensibly present

* Barry, The Scientific Habit of Thought, New York, 1927, pp. 212-213.

153

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

or present in memory. In fact it marks a change in dimen-
sions. Things are concrete to us in the degree in which they are
either means directly used or are ends directly appropriated
and enjoyed. Mathematical ideas were "concrete" when they
were employed exclusively for building bins for grain or
measuring land, selling goods, or aiding a pilot in guiding his
ship. They became abstract when they were freed from con-
nection with any particular existential application and use.
This happened when operations made possible by symbols
were performed exclusively with reference to facilitating and
directing other operations also symbolic in nature. It is one
kind of thing, a concrete one, to measure the area of a triangle
so as to measure a piece of land, and another kind an
abstract one to measure it simply as a means of measuring
other areas symbolically designated. The latter type of opera-
tion makes possible a system of conceptions related together as
conceptions} it thus prepares the way for formal logic.

Abstraction from use in special and direct situations was
coincident with the formation of a science of ideas, of mean-
ings, whose relations to one another rather than to things was
the goal of thought. It is a process, however, which is subject
to interpretation by a fallacy. Independence from any speci-
fied application is readily taken to be equivalent to independ-
ence from application as such} it is as if specialists, engaged in
perfecting tools and having no concern with their use and
so interested in the operation of perfecting that they carry
results beyond any existing possibilities of use, were to argue
that therefore they are dealing with an independent realm
having no connection with tools or utilities. This fallacy is
especially easy to fall into on the part of intellectual special-
ists. It played its part in the generation of a priori rationalism.
It is the origin of that idolatrous attitude toward universals
so often recurring in the history of thought. Those who handle

154

THE PLAY OF IDEAS

ideas through symbols as if they were things f or ideas
objects of thought and trace their mutual relations in all
kinds of intricate and unexpected relationships, are ready vic-
tims to thinking of these objects as if they had no sort of
reference to things, to existence.

In fact, the distinction is one between operations to be
actually performed and possible operations as such, as merely
possible. Shift of reflection to development of possible opera-
tions in their logical relations to one another opens up oppor-
tunities for operations that would never be directly suggested.
But its origin and eventual meaning lie in acts that deal with
concrete situations. As to origin in overt operations there can
be no doubt. Operations of keeping tally and scoring are
found in both work and games. No complex development of
the latter is possible without such acts and their appropriate
symbols. These acts are the originals of number and of all
developments of number. There are many arts in which the
operations of enumeration characteristic of keeping tally are
explicitly used for measuring. Carpentry and masonry for
example cannot go far without some device, however rude,
for estimating size and bulk. If we generalize what happens
in such instances, we see that the indispensable need is that
of adjusting things as means, as resources, to other things as
ends.

The origin of counting and measuring is in economy and
efficiency of such adjustments. Their results are expressed by
physical means, at first notches, scratches, tying knots; later
by figures and diagrams. It is easy to find at least three types
of situations in which this adjustment of means to ends are
practical necessities. There is the case of allotment or distri-
bution of materials; of accumulation of stores against antici-
pated days of need; of exchange of things in which there is a
surplus for things in which there is a deficit. The fundamental

155

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

mathematical conceptions of equivalence, serial order, sum and
unitary parts, of correspondence and substitution, are all im-
plicit in the operations that deal with such situations, although
they become explicit and generalized only when operations are
conducted symbolically in reference to one another.

The failure of empiricism to account for mathematical
ideas is due to its failure to connect them with acts performed.
In accord with its sensationalistic character, traditional em-
piricism sought their origin in sensory impressions, or at most
in supposed abstraction from properties antecedently character-
izing physical things. Experimental empiricism, has none of the
difficulties of Hume and Mill in explaining the origin of math-
ematical truths. It recognizes that experience, the actual expe-
rience of men, is one of doing acts, performing operations,
cutting, marking off, dividing up, extending, piecing together,
joining, assembling and mixing, hoarding and dealing outj in
general, selecting and adjusting things as means for reaching
consequences. Only the peculiar hypnotic effect exercised by
exclusive preoccupation with knowledge could have led think-
ers to identify experience with reception of sensations, when
five minutes' observation of a child would have disclosed that
sensations count only as stimuli and registers of motor activity
expended in doing things.

All that was required for the development of mathematics
as a science and for the growth of a logic of ideas, that is, of
implications of operations with respect one to another, was
that some men should appear upon the scene who were inter-
ested in the operations on their own account, as operations,
and not as means to specified particular uses. When symbols
were devised for operations cut off from concrete application,
as happened under the influence of the esthetic interest of
the Greeks, the rest followed naturally. Physical means, the
straight edge, the compass and the marker remained, and so did

[THE PLAY OF IDEAS

physical diagrams. But the latter were only "figures," images
in the Platonic sense. Intellectual force was carried by the
operations they symbolized, ruler and compass were only means
for linking up with one another a series of operations repre-
sented by symbols. Diagrams, etc., were particular and variable,
but the operations were uniform and general in their intel-
lectual force: that is, in their relation to other operations.

When once the way was opened to thinking in terms of
possible operations irrespective of actual performance, there
was no limit to development save human ingenuity. In gen-
eral, it proceeded along two lines. On the one hand, for the
execution of tasks of physical inquiry, special intellectual in-
strumentalities were needed, and this need led to the invention
of new operations and symbolic systems. The Cartesian ana-
lytics and the calculuses of Leibniz and Newton are cases in
point. Such developments have created a definite body of sub-
ject-matter that, historically, is as empirical as is the historic
sequence of, say, spinning-machines. Such a body of material
arouses need for examination on its own account. It is sub-
jected to careful inspection with reference to the relations
found within its own content. Indications of superfluous opera-
tions are eliminated j ambiguities are detected and analyzed j
massed operations are broken up into definite constituents}
gaps and unexplained jumps are made good by insertion of
connecting operations. In short, certain canons of rigorous
interrelation of operations are developed and the old material
is correspondingly revised and extended.

Nor is the work merely one of analytic revision. The
detection, for example, of the logical looseness of the
Euclidean postulate regarding parallels suggested operations
previously unthought of, and opened up new fields those of
the hyper-geometries. Moreover, the possibility of combining
various existing branches of geometry as special cases of more

157

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

comprehensive operations (illustrated by the same instance)
led to creation of mathematics of a higher order of generality.
I am not interested in tracing the history of mathematics.
What is wanted is to indicate that once the idea of possible
operations, indicated by symbols and performed only by means
of symbols, is discovered, the road is opened to operations of
ever increasing definiteness and comprehensiveness. Any group
of symbolic operations suggests further operations that may
be performed. Technical symbols are framed with precisely
this end in view. They have three traits that distinguish them
from casual terms and ideas. They are selected with a view to
designating unambiguously one mode of interaction and one
only. They are linked up with symbols of other operations
forming a system such that transition is possible with the
utmost economy of energy from one to another. And the aim
is that these transitions may occur as far as possible in any
direction. I. "Water" for example suggests an indefinite num-
ber of actsj seeing, tasting, drinking, washing without specifi-
cation of one in preference to another. It also marks off water
from other colorless liquids only in a vague way. 2. At the
same time, it is restricted j it does not connect the liquid with
solid and gaseous forms, and still less does it indicate opera-
tions which link the production of water to other things into
which its constituents, oxygen and hydrogen, enter. It is iso-
lated instead of being a transitive concept. 3. The chemical
conception, symbolized by EUO, not only meets these two
requirements which "water" fails to meet, but oxygen and
hydrogen are in turn connected with the whole system of
chemical elements and specified combinations among them in
a systematic way. Starting from the elements and the relation
defined in KUO one can, so to speak, travel through all the
whole scope and range of complex and varied phenomena.
Thus the scientific conception carries thought and action away

THE PLAY OF IDEAS

from qualities which are finalities as they are found in direct
perception and use, to the mode of production of these quali-
ties, and it performs this task in a way which links this mode
of generation to a multitude of other "efficient" causal condi-
tions in the most economical and effective manner.

Mathematical conceptions, by means of symbols of opera-
tions that are irrespective of actual performance, carry abstrac-
tion much further} one has only to contrast "2" as attached
physically to H, to "2" as pure number. The latter designates
an operative relation applioz^/^ to anything whatsoever, though
not actually applied to any specified object. And, of course,
it stands in defined relations to all other numbers, and by a
system of correspondences with continuous quantities as well.
That numbers disregard all qualitative distinctions is a familiar
fact. This disregard is the consequence of construction of sym-
bols dealing with possible operations in abstraction from the
actuality of performance. If time and knowledge permitted,
it could be shown that the difficulties and paradoxes which
have been found to attend the logic of number disappear when
instead of their being treated as either essences or as proper-
ties of things in existence, they are viewed as designations of
potential operations. Mathematical space is not a kind of space
distinct from so-called physical and empirical space, but is a
name given to operations ideally or formally possible with
respect to things having spacious qualities: it is not a mode of
Being, but a way of thinking things so that connections among
them are liberated from fixity in experience and implication
from one to another is made possible.

The distinction between physical and mathematical con-
ception may be brought out by noting an ambiguity in the term
"possible" operations. Its primary meaning is actually, existen-
tially, possible. Any idea as such designates an operation that
may be performed, not something in actual existence. The Idea

159

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

of the sweetness of, say, sugar, is an indication of the conse-
quences of a possible operation of tasting as distinct from a
directly experienced quality. Mathematical ideas are designa-
tions of possible operations in another and secondary sense,
previously expressed in speaking of the possibility of sym-
bolic operations with respect to one another. This sense of
possibility is ^^possibility of operations, not possibility of
performance with respect to existence. Its test is non-incom-
patibility. The statement of this test as consistency hardly car-
ries the full meaning. For consistency is readily interpreted to
signify the conformity of one meaning with others already
had, and is in so far restrictive. "Non-incompatibility" indi-
cates that all developments are welcome as long as they do
not conflict with one another, or as long as restatement of an
operation prevents actual conflict. It is a canon of liberation
rather than of restriction. It may be compared with natural
selection, which is a principle of elimination but not one con-
trolling positive development.

Mathematics and formal logic thus mark highly special-
ized branches of intellectual industry, whose working princi-
ples are very similar to those of works of fine art. The trait
that strikingly characterize them is combination of freedom
with rigor freedom with respect to development of new
operations and ideas j rigor with respect to formal compossi-
bilities. The combination of these qualities, characteristic also
of works of great art, gives the subject great fascination for
some minds. But the belief that these qualifications remove
mathematical objects from all connection with existence ex-
presses a religious mood rather than a scientific discovery.*

The significant difference is that of two types of possi-

*"The long continued and infrequently interrupted study of absolutely
invariant existences exercises a powerful hypnotic influence on the mind.
The world which it separates from the rest of experience and makes into the
whole of being is a world of unchanging and apparently eternal order, the

1 6O

THE PLAY OR IDEAS

bility of operation, material and symbolic. This distinction
when frozen into the dogma of two orders of Being, existence
and essence, gives rise to the notion that there are two types
of logic and two criteria of truth, the formal and the material,
of which the formal is higher and more fundamental. In
truth, the formal development is a specialized offshoot of
material thinking. It is derived ultimately from acts per-
formed, and constitutes an extension of such acts, made pos-
sible by symbols, on the basis of congruity with one another.
Consequently formal logic represents an analysis of exclu-
sively symbolic operations j it is, in a pregnant and not external
sense, symbolic logic. This interpretation of mathematical and
(formal) logical ideas is not a disparagement of them except
from a mystical point of view. Symbols, as has already been
noted, afford the only way of escape from submergence in
existence. The liberation afforded by the free symbolism of
mathematics is often a means of ulterior return to existential
operations that have a scope and penetrating power not other-
wise attainable. The history of science is full of illustrations
of cases in which mathematical ideas for which no physical
application was known suggested in time new existential
relations.

The theory which has been advanced of the nature of
essences (universals, invariants) may be tested by comparing
the conditions which symbolic operations fulfill with the attri-
butes traditionally imputed to the former. These attributes
are ideality, universality, immutability, formality, and the
subsistence of relations of implication that make deduction
possible. There is a one to one correspondence between these
characters and those of objects of thought which are defined

only Absolute cold intellect need not reject. A conviction thus establishes
itself which finally affects the whole of waking thought: that in this experience
one has at last discovered the eternal and ultimate truth." Barry, Op. cit,
pp. 182-183.

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

in terms of operations that are compossible with respect to one
another.

The correspondence will be approached by pointing out
the traits of a machine which marks its structure in view of
the function it fulfills. It is obvious that this structure can be
understood not by sense but only by thought of the relations
which the parts of the machine sustain to one another, in con-
nection with the work the machine as a whole performs (the
consequences it effects). Sensibly, one is merely overwhelmed
in the presence of a machine by noises and forms. Clarity and
order of perceived objects are introduced when forms are
judged in relation to operations, and these in turn in relation to
work done. Movements may be seen in isolation, and products,
goods turned out, may be perceived in isolation. The machine
is known only when these are thought in connection with one
another. In this thought, motions and parts are judged as
means; they are referred intellectually to something else} to
think of anything as means is to apprehend an object in rela-
tion. Correlatively, the physical effect is judged as consequence
something related. The relation of means-consequence may
thus justifiably be termed ideal in the sense of ideational.

Operations as such, that is, as connective interactions, are
uniform. Physically and sensibly, a machine changes through
friction, exposure to weather, etc., while products vary in
quality. Processes are local and temporal, particular. But the
relation of means and consequence which defines an operation
remains one and the same in spite of these variations. It is a
universal. A machine turns out a succession of steel spheres,
like ball-bearings. These closely resemble one another, because
they are products of like process. But there is no absolute ex-
actitude among them. Each process is individual and not
exactly identical with others. But the function for which the
machine is designed does not alter with these changes} an

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THE PLAY OF IDEAS

operation, being a relation, is not a process. An operation deter-
mines any number of processes and products all differing from
one another j but being a telephone or a cutting tool is a self-
identical universal, irrespective of the multiplicity of special
objects which manifest the function.

The relation is thus invariant. It is eternal, not in the sense
of enduring throughout all time, or being everlasting like an
Aristotelian species or a Newtonian substance, but in the sense
that an operation as a relation which is grasped in thought is
independent of the instances in which it is overtly exemplified,
although its meaning is found only in the 'possibility of these
actualizations.

The relation, between things as means and things as conse-
quences, which defines a machine is ideal in another sense. It
is the standard by which the value of existential processes are
estimated. The deterioration or improvement in use of a con-
crete machine and the worth of an invention are judged by
reference to efficiency in accomplishment of a function. The
more adequately the functional relation can be apprehended
in the abstract, the better can the engineer detect defects in
an existent machine and project improvements in it. Thus the
thought of it operates as a model j it has an archetypal char-
acter with respect to particular machines.

Thought of an object as an ideal therefore determines a
characteristic internal structure or form. This formal struc-
ture is only approximated by existing things. One may con-
ceive of a steam engine which has a one hundred per cent
efficiency, although no such ideal is even remotely approached
in actuality. Or, one may like Helmholtz conceive an ideal
optical apparatus in which the defects of the existing human
eye are not found. The ideal relationship of means to ends
exists as a formal possibility determined by the nature of the
case even though it be not thought of, much less realized in

163

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

fact. It subsists as a possibility, and as a possibility it is in its
formal structure necessary. That is to say, the conditions which
have to be met and fulfilled in the idea of a machine having
an efficiency of one hundred per cent are set by the necessities
of the casej they do not alter with defects in our apprehension
of them. Hence essences may be regarded as having Being
independent of and logically prior to our thought of them.
There is, however, in this fact nothing of the mystery or
transcendental character which is often associated with it. It
signifies that if one is to attain a specified result one must
conform to the conditions which are means of securing this
result j if one is to get the result with the maximum of effi-
ciency, there are conditions having a necessary relationship to
that intent.

This necessity of a structure marked by formal relation-
ships which fulfill the conditions of serving as means for an
end, accounts for the relations of implication which make
deduction possible. One goes into a factory and finds that the
operation of reaching an end, say, making in quantity shoes of
a uniform standard, is subdivided into a number of processes,
each of which is adapted to the one which precedes, and, until
the final one, to that which follows. One does not make a
miracle or mystery of the fact that while each machine and
each process is physically separate, nevertheless all are adapted
to one another. For he knows that they have been designed,
through a "rationalization" of the undertaking, to effect this
end.

The act of knowing is also highly complex. Experience
shows that it also may be best effected by analysis into a
number of distinct processes, which bear a serial relation to
one another. Terms and propositions which symbolize the pos-
sible operations that are to control these processes are designed
so that they will lead one to another with the maximum of

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THE PLAY OF IDEAS

definiteness, flexibility and fertility. In other words, they are
constructed with reference to the function of implication. De-
duction or dialectic is the operation of developing these impli-
cations, which may be novel and unexpected just as a tool
often gives unexpected results when working under new con-
ditions. One is entitled to marvel at the constructive power
with which symbols have been devised having far-reaching
and fruitful implications. But the wonder is misdirected when
it is made the ground for hypostatizing the objects of thought
into a realm of transcendent Being.

This phase of the discussion is not complete till it has
been explicitly noted that all general conceptions (ideas, the-
ories, thought) are hypothetical. Ability to frame hypotheses
is the means by which man is liberated from submergence in
the existences that surround him and that play upon him physi-
cally and sensibly. It is the positive phase of abstraction. But
hypotheses are conditional j they have to be tested by the con-
sequences of the operations they define and direct. The dis-
covery of the value of hypothetical ideas when employed to
suggest and direct concrete processes, and the vast extension of
this operation in the modern history of science, mark a great
emancipation and correspondent increase of intellectual con-
trol. But their final value is not determined by their internal
elaboration and consistency, but by the consequences they
effect in existence as that is perceptibly experienced. Scientific
conceptions are not a revelation of prior and independent real-
ity. They are a system of hypotheses, worked out under con-
ditions of definite test, by means of which our intellectual and
practical traffic with nature is rendered freer, more secure and
more significant.

Our discussion has been one-sided in that it has dealt with
the matter of conceptions mainly in reference to the "ration-
alistic" tradition of interpretation. The reasons for this em-

165

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

phasis are too patent to need exposition. But before leaving the
topic, it should be noted that traditional empiricism has also
misread the significance of conceptions or general ideas. It has
steadily opposed the doctrine of their a priori character j it has
connected them with experience of the actual world. But even
more obviously than the rationalism it has opposed, empiricism
has connected the origin, content and measure of validity of
general ideas with antecedent existence. According to it, con-
cepts are formed by comparing particular objects, already per-
ceived, with one another, and then eliminating the elements in
which they disagree and retaining that which they have in
common. Concepts are thus simply memoranda of identical
features in objects already perceived j they are conveniences,
bunching together a variety of things scattered about in con-
crete experience. But they have to be proved by agreement
with the material of particular antecedent experiences j their
value and function is essentially retrospective. Such ideas are
dead, incapable of performing a regulative office in new situa-
tions. They are "empirical" in the sense in which the term
is opposed to scientific that is, they are mere summaries of
results obtained under more or less accidental circum-
stances.

Our next chapter will be devoted to explicit consideration
of the historic philosophies of empiricism and rationalism about
the nature of knowledge. Before passing to this theme, we
conclude with a summary statement of the more important re-
sults reached in the present phase of discussion. First, the
active and productive character of ideas, of thought, is mani-
fest. The motivating desire of idealistic systems of philosophy
is justified. But the constructive office of thought is empirical
that is, experimental. "Thought" is not a property of some-
thing termed intellect or reason apart from nature. It is a
mode of directed overt action. Ideas are anticipatory plans

1 66

THE PLAY OF IDEAS

and designs which take effect in concrete ^constructions of an-
tecedent conditions of existence. They are not innate properties
of mind corresponding to ultimate prior traits of Being, nor
are they a priori categories imposed on sense in a wholesale,
once-for-all way, prior to experience so as to make it possible.
The active power of ideas is a reality, but ideas and idealisms
have an operative force in concrete experienced situations j
their worth has to be tested by the specified consequences of
their operation. Idealism is something experimental not ab-
stractly rational j it is related to experienced needs and con-
cerned with projection of operations which remake the actual
content of experienced objects.

Secondly, ideas and idealisms are in themselves hypotheses
not finalities. Being connected with operations to be performed,
they are tested by the consequences of these operations, not
by what exists prior to them. Prior experience supplies the
conditions which evoke ideas and of which thought has to
take account, with which it must reckon. It furnishes both
obstacles to attainment of what is desired and the resources
that must be used to attain it. Conception and systems of
conceptions, ends in view and plans, are constantly making and
remaking as fast as those already in use reveal their weak-
nesses, defects and positive values. There is no predestined
course they must follow. Human experience consciously guided
by ideas evolves its own standards and measures and each new
experience constructed by their means is an opportunity for
new ideas and ideals.

In the third place, action is at the heart of ideas. The
experimental practice of knowing, when taken to supply the
pattern of philosophic doctrine of mind and its organs, elimi-
nates the age-old separation of theory and practice. It dis-
closes that knowing is itself a kind of action, the only one
which progressively and securely clothes natural existence with

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

realized meanings. For the outcome of experienced objects
which are begot by operations which define thinking, take into
themselves, as part of their own funded and incorporated
meaning, the relation to other things disclosed by thinking.
There are no sensory or perceived objects fixed in themselves.
In the course of experience, as far as that is an outcome in-
fluenced by thinking, objects perceived, used and enjoyed take
up into their own meaning the results of thought j they be-
come ever richer and fuller of meanings. This issue constitutes
the last significance of the philosophy of experimental ideal-
ism. Ideas direct operations} the operations have a result in
which ideas are no longer abstract, mere ideas, but where
they qualify sensible objects. The road from a perceptible
experience which is blind, obscure, fragmentary, meager in
meaning, to objects of sense which are also objects which sat-
isfy, reward and feed intelligence is through ideas that are
experimental and operative.

Our conclusion depends upon an analysis of what takes
place in the experimental inquiry of natural science. It goes
without saying that the wider scope of human experience,
that which is concerned with distinctively human conditions
and ends, does not comport, as it currently exists, with the re-
sult that the examination of natural science yields. The genu-
inely philosophic force, as distinct from a technical one, of
the conclusion reached lies in precisely this incongruity. The
fact that the most exacting type of experience has attained a
marvelous treasury of working ideas that are used in control
of objects is an indication of possibilities as yet unattained in
less restricted forms of experience. Negatively, the result in-
dicates the need of thoroughgoing revision of ideas of mind
and thought and their connection with natural things that
were formed before the rise of experimental inquiry;
such is the critical task imposed on contemporary thought.

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THE PLAY OF IDEAS

Positively, the result achieved in science is a challenge to
philosophy to consider the possibility of the extension of the
method of operative intelligence to direction of life in other
fields.

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CHAPTER VII

THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL
AUTHORITY

THE DISPUTE AS to whether reason and conception or percep-
tion and sense are the source and test of ultimate knowledge
is one of the most enduring in the history of thought. It has
affected philosophy from the side of both the nature of the
object of knowledge and the mental faculty operating to
obtain it. From the side of the object those who put forward
the claims of reason have placed the universal higher than
the individual} those who have held to perception have re-
versed the order. From the side of mind, one school has em-
phasized the synthetic action of conceptions. The other school
has dwelt upon the fact that in sensation the mind does not
interfere with the action of objects in writing their own re-
port. The opposition has extended to problems of conduct
and society. On one hand, there is emphasis upon the neces-
sity of control by rational standards j on the other hand, the
dynamic quality of wants has been insisted upon together
with the intimately personal character of their satisfaction
as against the pale remoteness of pure thought. On the
political side, there is a like division between the adherents
of order and organization, those who feel that reason alone
gives security, and those interested in freedom, innovation and
progress, those who have used the claims of the individual
and his desires as a philosophical basis.

The controversy is acute and longstanding. In consequence
of it, philosophers have expended energy in controversy with

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THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY

one another, and the guidance they have given to practical
affairs has been largely by way of support to partisans of con-
tending forces. The situation raises a further point in our in-
quiry: What is the bearing of the experimental theory of
knowing upon the rival contentions? The first point which
presents itself is that the object of knowledge is eventual j
that is, it is an outcome of directed experimental operations,
instead of something in sufficient existence before the act of
knowing. The further point to be presented is that, along with
this change, sensible and rational factors cease to be competi-
tors for primary rank. They are allies, cooperating to make
knowledge possible. Isolation from each other is an expression
of the isolation of each from organic connection with action.
When theory is placed in opposition to practice, there is ground
for dispute as to whether primacy in theory shall go to sense
or intellect. Directed activity demands ideas which go beyond
the results of past perceptions, for it goes out to meet future
and as yet unexperienced situations. But it deals, both in origin
and outcome, with things which can be had only directly,
through immediate perception and enjoyment.

The three chief contending doctrines in this field are sen-
sational empiricism, rationalism and Kantianism, with its com-
promise of the factors isolated in the two other schools. The
doctrine of Kant has a superficial resemblance to the one just
stated} it insists upon the necessity of both perception and ideas
if there is to be knowledge. It is convenient, accordingly, to be-
gin discussion with it. The element of similarity is suggested by
Kant's well known saying that perception without conception
is blind, conception without perception empty. His doctrine
none the less is fundamentally different from that which results
from an analysis of experimental knowing. The fundamental
difference lies in the fact that, according to the latter, the dis-
tinction of sense and thought occurs within the process of re-

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

flective inquiry, and the two are connected together by means
of operations overtly performed. In the Kantian scheme, the
two originally exist in independence of each other, and their
connection is established by operations that are covert and are
performed in the hidden recesses of mind, once for all. As to
their original difference, sense-material is impressed from with-
out, while connective conceptions are supplied from within the
understanding. As to connection, synthesis takes place not in-
tentionally and by means of the controlled art of investigation,
but automatically and all at once.

From the experimental point of view, the art of knowing
demands skill in selecting appropriate sense-data on one side
and connecting principles, or conceptual theories, on the other.
It requires a developed and constantly progressive technique
to settle upon both the observational data and the idea that
assist inquiry in reaching a conclusion in any particular case.
But in Kant's view, the distinction and the connection between
the two, while necessary to anything which may be termed
cognition, have nothing to do with the validity of any particu-
lar enterprise of knowing. Illusion and error exemplify the
synthesis of sense and understanding quite as much as does the
soundest instance of scientific discovery. In one case, the heart
of the whole matter is the exercise of a differential control
which makes the difference between good and bad knowing. In
Kant's scheme the blessings of the categories descend upon the
material of sense without reference to making a distinction be-
tween the true and the false.

We summarize the differences as follows. I. In experi-
mental knowing, the antecedent is always the subject-matter
of some experience which has its origin in natural causes, but
which, not having been controlled in its occurrence, is uncertain
and problematic. Original objects of experience are produced
by the natural interactions of organism and environment, and

172

THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY

in themselves are neither sensible, conceptual nor a mixture of
the two. They are precisely the qualitative material of all our
ordinary untested experiences. 2. The distinction between sense-
data and interpretive ideas is deliberately instituted by the
process of inquiry, for sake of carrying it forward to an ade-
quately tested conclusion, one with a title to acceptance. 3.
Hence each term of the distinction is not absolute and fixed, but
is contingent and tentative. Each is subject to revision as we find
observational data which supply better evidence, and as the
growth of science provides better directive hypotheses to draw
upon. 4. Hence the material selected to serve as data and as
regulative principles constantly check one another j any advance
in one brings about a corresponding improvement in the other.
The two are constantly working together to effect a rearrange-
ment of the original experienced material in the construction
of a new object having the properties that make it understood
or known.

These statements are formal, but their meaning is not rec-
ondite. Any scientific investigation illustrates their significance.
The astronomer, chemist, botanist, start from the material
of gross unanalyzed experience, that of the "common-sense"
world in which we live, suflFer, act and enjoyj from familiar
stars, suns, moons, from acids, salts and metals, trees, mosses
and growing plants. Then the process of investigation divides
into two kinds of operations. One is that of careful and analytic
observation to determine exactly what there is which is indubi-
tably seen, touched and heard. An operation takes place to dis-
cover what the sure data of the problem are, the evidence which
theoretical explanation must reckon with. The other operation
consists in searching through previous knowledge to obtain
ideas which may be used to interpret this observed material
and to suggest the initiation of new experiments. By these lat-
ter, more data are had, and the additional evidence they

173

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

supply suggests new ideas and more experiments until the prol>
lem is resolved. The investigator never makes the division be-
tween perceptual and conceptual material at large or whole-
sale. He is careful at each stage of inquiry to discriminate
between what he has observed and what is a matter of theory
and ideas, using the latter as means of directing further ob-
servations, the results of which test the application of the
ideas and theories employed. Finally, the original ma-
terial is reorganized into a coherent and settled form
capable of entering integrally into the general system of
science.

A physician, for example, is called by a patient. His orig-
inal material of experience is thereby provided} it requires a
stretch of useless imagination to fancy that the ill man is a
mass of sense data organized by categories. This experienced
object sets the problem of inquiry. Certain clinical operations
are performed, sounding, tapping, getting registrations o
pulse, temperature, respiration, etc. These constitute the symp-
toms} they supply the evidence to be interpreted. The philoso-
pher or logician, looking on, sees they are that part of the
original object which is capable of being presented in observa-
tion as that is sensibly present. The results are not all that is
or can be observed, but are those phases and portions of the
experienced whole that are judged to be relevant to making an
inference as to the nature of the ailment. The observations
mean something not in and of themselves, but are given
meaning in the light of the systematized knowledge of medi-
cine as far as that is at the command of the practitioner. He
calls upon his store of knowledge to suggest ideas that may
aid him in reaching a judgment as to the nature of the trouble
and its proper treatment. The analytic philosopher, looking on,
notes that the interpreting material, by means of which the
scattered data of sense are bound together into a coherent

THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY

whole, is not itself directly sensibly present. So he calls it
ideational or conceptual.

Sense data are signs which direct this selection of ideas j
the ideas when suggested arouse new observations j the two
together determine his final judgment or diagnosis and his
procedure. Something is then added to the store of the clinical
material of medical art so that subsequent observations of
symptoms are refined and extended, and the store of material
from which to draw ideas is further enlarged. To this process
of cooperation of observation and conceptual or general ideas
there is no limit. In no case are the data the whole of the
original objectj they are material selected for the purpose of
serving as evidence and signs. In no case do general ideas, prin-
ciples, laws, conceptions, determine the conclusion although
just as some men collect fragmentary observations without
trying to find out what they mean, so in other cases an un-
skilled worker permits some preconceived idea to control his
decision instead of using it as a hypothesis.

The case seems simple enough, so simple indeed that it
may be supposed that we have overlooked the conditions which
have created perplexity and controversy. But the source of
these complications is that theories about the mind, about sen-
sation and perception, about reason, the intellect, conceptions
and perception, were framed and established in philosophy
before the rise of experimental knowing. It is difficult to break
loose from habits thus engendered so as to turn attention in a
whole-hearted way to actual inquiry. While it may seem pre-
sumptuous to set up the case of the physician or some other
concrete inquirer over against the elaborate machinery of the
Critique of Pure Reason and the countless tomes of commen-
tary it has called forth, our picture has behind it the whole
weight of the experimental practices by which science has been
actually advanced.

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

More specifically, it may be asserted that the Kantian the-
ory went wrong because it took distinctions that are genuine
and indispensable out of their setting and function in actual
inquiry. It generalized them into fixed and wholesale distinc-
tions, losing sight of their special roles in attainment of those
tested beliefs which give security. Consequently artificial com-
plications were engendered, and insoluble puzzles created.

Take for example the fragmentary and isolated character
of sense-data. Taken in isolation from a context in a particu-
lar inquiry they undoubtedly have this character. Hence when
they are generalized into a character at large, the result is
the doctrine of the disconnected "atomicity" of sense-data.
This doctrine is common to sensationalism and to some forms
of the new realism, along with Kantianism. As a matter of
fact, smells, tastes, sounds, pressures, colors, etc., are not iso-
lated j they are bound together by all kinds of interactions or
connections, among which are included the habitual responses
of the one having the experience. Some connections are organic,
flowing from the constitution of the subject. Others have be-
come engrained in habit because of education and the cus-
tomary state of culture. But these habitual connections are
obstacles rather than aids. Some of them are irrelevant and mis-
leading. In any case, they fail to provide the clews, the evi-
dence, which is wanted in the particular inquiry in hand. Con-
sequently, sense qualities are artificially isolated from their
ordinary connections so that the inquirer is free to see them in
a new light or as constituents of a new object.

Since the very need for inquiry shows that there is a
<problem set by the existing situation, there can be no under-
standing of it achieved until there are new connections estab-
lished. The fragmentary and isolated character of sense-data
does not therefore describe anything belonging to them intrin-
sically, but marks a transitory, although necessary, stage in

THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY

the progress of inquiry. The isolation of sense-data from their
status and office in furthering the objective of knowing is re-
sponsible for treating them as a kind of isolated atomic exist-
ence. If we keep an eye on the actual enterprise of knowing, it
is clear that only sense-data can supply evidential subject-
matter} ideas of what is not presented in sense interpret evi-
dence, but they cannot constitute it. The whole history of
science shows, however, that material directly and originally
observed does not furnish good evidential material} as we
saw, it was the essential mistake of ancient science to suppose
that we can base inference upon observed objects without an
artificial prior analytic resolution. Hence there is need of a
distinctive type of experimental operations which detach some
qualities of the object} these form sense-data in the technical
meaning of the word.

Traditional empiricism was accordingly right in insisting
that no amount of conceptions, of thought material, could by
itself deliver any knowledge of existence, no matter how
elaborate be the conceptual system and how internally coher-
ent. We cannot derive existence from thought pace idealism.
Observed material is necessary to suggest ideas and it is equally
necessary to test them. The senses are, existentially speaking,
the organs by which we obtain the material of observation.
But, as we have previously noted, this material is significant
and effective for purposes of knowing only as it is connected
with operations of which it is the product. Merely physical
interactions, whether of external things or of the organism,
yield observations that form the material of inquiry} a prob-
lematic material. Only operations intentionally performed and
attentively noted in connection with their products give ob-
served material a positive intellectual value, and this condi-
tion is satisfied only by thought: ideas are the perception of
this connection. Even non-scientific experience, as far as it

177

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

has meaning, is neither mere doing nor mere undergoing, but
is an acknowledgment of the connection between something
done and something undergone in consequence of the doing.

In its later history, empiricism tended to identify sensory
consequences with "mental" or psychical states and processes j
this identification was the logical conclusion of taking the ob-
ject of science, in which these qualities are not found, as the
real object. But the insistence, as by contemporary realists,
that sense-data are external and not mental does not remedy
the logical error. It repeats the isolation of sense-data from
the intentional operations by which they are supplied and
from the purpose and function of these operations. Hence it
makes it necessary to call in the supplement of logical objects,
now termed essences. What is even more important, no light
is thrown upon the control of the course of actual inquiry. For
there is still failure to see that the distinction between sense-
data and objects of rational apprehension is one which occurs
within reflective investigation, for the sake of regulating its
procedure.

The history of the theory of knowledge or epistemology
would have been very different if instead of the word "data"
or "givens," it had happened to start with calling the quali-
ties in question "takens." Not that the data are not existential
and qualities of the ultimately "given" that is, the total
subject-matter which is had in non-cognitive experiences. But
as data they are selected from this total original subject-mat-
ter which gives the impetus to knowing} they are discriminated
for a purpose: that, namely, of affording signs or evidence
to define and locate a problem, and thus give a clew to its
resolution.

If we recur to the instance of the patient and the inquiries
of the physician, it is evident that the presence of a man who
is ill is the "given," and that this given is complex, marked

THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY

by all kinds of diverse qualities. Only the assumption such
is made by Kant and is common to the traditional theories
that all experience is inherently cognitive leads to the doctrine
that perception of the patient is a case of knowledge. In reality
the original perception furnishes the problem for knowing j
it is something to be known, not an object of knowing. And in
knowing, the first thing to be done is to select from the mass
of presented qualities those which, in distinction from other
qualities, throw light upon the nature of the trouble. As they
are deliberately selected, being discriminated by special tech-
nical operations, they become data; these are called sensible
simply because of the role of sense organs in their generation.
They may then be formulated as the subject-matter of primi-
tive existential propositions. But even so, there is no class
of such propositions In general. Each inquiry yields its own
primitive existential propositions, even though they all agree
in having for their objects qualities which investigation reveals
to be connected with the use of organs of sense. Moreover,
these primitive propositions are such only in a logical sense
as distinct from being empirically primitive, and they are only
hypothetical or conditional. This statement does not imply
that their existence is hypothetical j perception, as far as it is
properly conducted, warrants their existence. But their status
in inquiry is tentative. Many, perhaps most, errors in physical
inference arise from taking as data things that are not data
for the problem in hand; they undoubtedly exist, but they are
not the evidence that is demanded. In some respects, the more
undoubted the existence of sensory qualities, the less certain is
their meaning for inference j the very fact that a quality is
glaringly obvious in perception exercises an undue influence,
leading thought to take its evident presence as an equivalent of
evidential value. The reader of detective stories is aware that
it is a common device to have the inquirer misled by the too

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

patent character of given "clews"} genuine clews are usually
obscure and have to be searched out. The conditional character
of sense-data in inferential inquiry means, then, that they have
to be tested by their consequences. They are good clews or
evidence when they instigate operations whose effect is to solve
the problem in hand.

It is hardly necessary to repeat the criticisms of the ration-
alistic doctrine of conceptions that have been brought out in
previous chapters. The doctrine stood for a positive truth:
the necessity of relations, of connectivity in existence and
knowledge, and it noted the fact of the connection of relations
with thought. For while some connections are always found
in the material of experienced things, the fact that as experi-
enced these things are problematic and not definitively known,
means that important relations are not presented in them as
they stand. These relations have to be projected in anticipation
if the reactions of the inquiries are not blind fumblings if
they are genuinely experimental. Such relations must be
thought; they are present conceptually, not sensibly. They
represent possible consequences of operations, and the possible
and the conceivable are one. Just as sensationalism ignores the
functional role and hypothetical status of sensible qualities in
an inquiry, so rationalism makes a fixed and independent mat-
ter out of the utility of conceptions in directing inquiry to solve
particular problems.

The object of this criticism of historical theories of knowl-
edge is not just to cast discredit upon them. It is to direct at-
tention to the source of their errors. As soon as and when-
ever it is assumed that the office of knowledge is to lay hold
of existence which is prior to and apart from the operations
of inquiry and their consequences, one or other of these errors
or some combination of both of them is inevitable. Either
logical characters belonging to the operations of effective

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THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY

inquiry are read into antecedent existence} or the world as
known is reduced to a pulverized multiplicity of atomically
isolated elements, a Kantian "manifold"; or some machinery
is devised, whether of an "idealistic" or a "realistic" sort, to
bring the two together.

When, on the other hand, it is seen that the object of
knowledge is prospective and eventual, being the result of
inferential or reflective operations which redispose what was
antecedently existent, the subject-matters called respectively
sensible and conceptual are seen to be complementary in effec-
tive direction of inquiry to an intelligible conclusion.

There is another way of discussing the fundamental issue
which does not involve so much going over topics worn thread-
bare by previous discussion. In effect, traditional theories treat
all reflective or inferential knowing as cases of "explanation,"
and by explanation is meant making some seemingly new ob-
ject or problem plain and clear by identifying its elements
with something previously known, ultimately something said
to be known immediately and intuitively, or without infer-
ence. In traditional theory, "discursive" knowledge, that in-
volving reflection, must always be referred for its validation
back to what is immediately known. It cannot bring its
credentials with it and test its results in the very process of
reaching them. There is postulated identity implicit or explicit
of the results of inference with things known without infer-
ence. Making the identity explicit constitutes proof.

There are many different and opposed theories regarding
the way in which this identification takes place. There is a doc-
trine that the operation is one of subsumption of given particu-
lars under given universals; that it is classificatory definition;
that it is a kind of Platonic reminiscence in which perceptual
material is cognized by being identified with a priori forms;
that it is a case of schematization a la Kant; that it is an

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

assimilation of present sensations to images that revive previ-
ous sensations. These theories differ widely among themselves j
they are irreconcilable with one another. But they all have one
premise in common. They all assume that the conclusions of re-
flective inference must be capable of reduction to things already
known if they are to be proved. The quarrel between them is
strictly domestic, all in the family. The differences between
them concern the character of the original immediately known
objects with which the conclusions of reflection must be identi-
fied in order to be really known. They all involve the sup-
posed necessity that whatever is a product of inference must,
in order to be valid knowledge, be reducible to something
already known immediately. Thus they all take the element of
knowledge found in inferential conclusions to be simply a mat-
ter of restatement.*

The especial significance of the experimental procedure is
that it scraps once for all the notion that the results of infer-
ence must be validated by operations of identification of what-
ever sort. When we compare the premise which underlies all
the different theories that assume a primitive mode of direct
knowledge (knowledge which does not include reflection)
with the practice of experimental science, according to which
only the conclusion of reflective inquiry is known, we find
three marked points of contrast. The first difference is that the
traditional theories make all reflective knowledge to be a case
of recognition going back to an earlier more certain form of

*The logic of Stuart Mill is the classic logic of sensational empiricism.
Yet he demanded "canons" of proof for induction as rigorous as those of
Aristotle were for syllogistic reasoning. The essence of these canons is that
proof consists in identification of the results of inference with particulars
given in sense, just as with Aristotle demonstration consisted in subsuming
them under independently given universals. That the latter was influenced by
Euclidean geometry with its assumption of axioms as self-evident truths we
have already noticed. Mathematicians now recognize that indemonstrables
and indefinables are starting points of operations and that in themselves they
have neither meaning nor "truth."

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knowledge. The second is that they have no place for genuine
discovery, or creative novelty. The third point concerns the
dogmatic character of the assumption regarding what is said
to be immediately known, in contrast with the experimentally
tested character of the object known in consequence of reflec-
tion.

We begin with the last point. When it is stated that the
conclusions of knowledge involving inference must be sub-
ordinated to knowledge which is had directly and immediately,
and must be carried to the latter for proof and verification, we
are at once struck by the multitude of theories regarding what
is immediately and infallibly known. The diversity and con-
tradictions give ground for a suspicion that in no case is the
"knowledge" in question as self-evident as it is asserted to be.
And there is good theoretical ground for the suspicion. Suppose
a man "explains" the eclipse of the moon by saying it is due
to the attempt of a dragon to devour it. To him the devouring
dragon is a more evident fact than is the darkening of the
moon. To us the existence of an animal capable of such a feat
is the doubtful matter. It will be objected that it is unfair to
take such an absurd case as an instance: dragons are not the
sort of thing which any philosopher has asserted to be the ob-
ject of direct and certain non-inferential knowledge. But the
illustration still serves a purpose.

The thing to be known is "explained" by identification
with something else. What guarantees this something else?
If it too has to be guaranteed by identification with something
else, there is an infinite regress. To avoid this regress, we stop
short and assert that this or that object or truth is directly
known, by sense intuition, by rational intuition, as a direct de-
liverance of consciousness, or in some other way. But what is
such a procedure except the essence of what Bentham called
ipse dixitism? What is it but arbitrary dogmatism? Who guards

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

the guardians? The theory which placet* knowledge in rounded
out conclusions is in no such dilemma. It admits the hypo-
thetical status of all data and premises and appeals for justi-
fication to operations capable, when they are repeated, of
yielding like results. The antecedents do not have to be sub-
stantiated by being carried back to earlier antecedents and so
onj they are good and sound if they do what is wanted of them:
if they lead to an observable result which satisfies the conditions
set by the nature of the problem in hand.

The significance of this point comes out more clearly in
dealing with the genuineness of discovery or new knowledge.
By terms of the traditional theories, this is impossible in the
case of inference and reflective inquiry. We know, according to
them, only when we have assimilated the seemingly new to
something previously known immediately. In consequence,
all distinctive individual, or non-repeated, traits of things are
incapable of being known. What cannot be treated as a case
of something else stays outside knowledge. Individualized
characteristics are unknowable surds.

According to this doctrine, reflective inquiry may hit upon
new instances of laws, new specimens of old truths, new mem-
bers of old classes, but not upon intrinsically new objects of
knowledge. As far as empiricism is concerned the case of Locke
is instructive. His Essay on Human Understanding is one
continued effort to test all reflective beliefs and ideas what-
ever by reduction to original "simple ideas" that are infallibly
known in isolation from any inferential undertaking a point
in which many of the new realisms are still Lockeian.

If one looks at the course of science, we find a very differ-
ent story told. Important conclusions of science are those which
distinctly refuse to be identified" with anything previously
known. Instead of having to be proved by being assimilated to
the latter, they rather occasion revision of what men thought

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they previously knew. The recent crisis in physical science is
a case in point. The experimental discovery that the velocity of
light remains the same when measured either with or against
the direction of the earth's movement was totally unaccount-
able on the basis of previous knowing. But scientific men
accepted the consequences of their experimental operations as
constituting the known object, rather than feeling under obli-
gation to "prove" them by identification with what was said
to be antecedently known. Inferential inquiry in scientific pro-
cedure is an adventure in which conclusions confound expecta-
tion and upset what has been accepted as facts. It takes time
for these new facts to be assimilated: to become familiar. As-
similation of the new to the familiar is doubtless a precondi-
tion for our finding ourselves at home in the new and being
able to handle it freely. But the older theories virtually made
this personal and psychological phase of assimilation of new
and old into a test of knowledge itself.

The third point, that cognition is recognition, only presents
the same difficulty in another way. It presents it in a light
which brings out a distinctive point. The theory that knowledge
due to reflection consists in identifying something with what
is already known or possessed confuses the psychological trait
of familiarity, the quality of finding ourselves at ease in a
situation, with knowledge. The conception originated when
experimental knowing occurred only occasionally and as if
by accident j when discoveries were regarded as gifts of the
gods or as special inspirations: when men were governed by
custom and were uneasy in the presence of change and afraid
of the unknown. It was rationalized into a theory when the
Greeks succeeded in identifying natural phenomena with ra-
tional ideas and were delighted with the identification because
their esthetic interest made them at home in a world of such
harmony and order as that identification involved. They called

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the result science, although in fact it fastened wrong beliefs
about nature upon Europe for well nigh two thousand years.

Newtonian science, as we have seen in another connection,
in effect only substituted one set of identifying objects, the
mathematical, for those previously employed. It set up per-
manent substances, the particles or atoms having inherent
mathematical properties, as ultimate realities, and alleged that
reflective thought yields knowledge when it translates phe-
nomena into these properties. Thus it retained unimpaired the
theory that knowing signifies a process of identification. It
required over two centuries for the experimental method to
reach a point where men were forced to realize that progress
in science depends upon choice of operations performed and
not upon the properties of objects which were alleged to be so
antecedently certain and fixed that all detailed phenomena
might be reduced to them. This conception of knowledge still
dominates thinking in social and moral matters. When it is
realized that in these fields as in the physical, we know what we
intentionally construct, that everything depends upon deter-
mination of methods of operation and upon observation of the
consequences which test them, the progress of knowledge in
these affairs may also become secure and constant.

What has been said does not imply that previous knowl-
edge is not of immense importance in obtaining new knowl-
edge. What is denied is that this previous knowledge need be
immediate or intuitive, and that it provides the measure and
standard of conclusions obtained by inferential operations. In-
ferential inquiry is continuous j one phase passes into the next
which uses, tests and expands conclusions already obtained.
More particularly, the conclusions of prior knowledge are the
instruments of new inquiries, not the norm which determines
their validity. Objects of previous knowledge supply working
hypotheses for new situations j they are the source of sugges-

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THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY

tion of new operations; they direct inquiry. But they do not
enter into reflective knowing by way of providing its prem-
ises in a logical sense. The tradition of classic logic persists
in leading philosophers to call premises what in effect are
regulative and instrumental points of view for conducting new
observations.

We are constantly referring to what is already known to
get our bearings in any new situation. Unless there is some
reason to doubt whether presumptive knowledge is really
knowledge, we take it as a net product. It would be a waste
of time and energy to repeat the operations in virtue of which
the object is a known object unless there were ground for sus-
pecting its validity. Every adult, irrespective of whether he is
a man of science or not, carries in his head a large store of
things known in virtue of earlier operations. When a new
problem comes up, one habitually refers to what is already
known to get a start in dealing with it. Such objects, until we
have occasion to doubt them, are settled, assured; the given
situation is dubious, but they are secure. Hence we take them
for granted, we take them as a matter of course. Then if we
question them, we tend to fall back upon something else
already known. What is too easily overlooked (especially in
quest for certainty by attachment to the fixed) is that the
objects we thus fall back upon are themselves known in virtue
of previous operations of inferential inquiry and test, and
that their "immediacy" as objects of reference marks an as-
sured product of reflection. It is also overlooked that they
are referred to as instruments, rather than as fixed in and of
themselves. The case is similar to the use of tools previously
manufactured when we are dealing with the conditions of a
new situation; only when they prove defective does invention
of new tools demand recurrence to the operations by which
they were originally constructed.

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

This act of taking and using objects already known is
practically justified} it is like eating a fruit without asking
how it was grown. But many theories of knowledge take this
retrospective use of things known in virtue of earlier opera-
tions as typical of the nature of knowledge itself. Being re-
minded of something we already know is taken as the pattern
of all knowing. When the thing of which we are now retro-
spectively aware was in process of being known, it was prospec-
tive and eventual to inquiry, not something already "given."
And it has cognitive force in a new inquiry whose objective and
ultimate object is now prospective. Taking what is already
known or pointing to it is no more a case of knowledge than
taking a chisel out of a tool-box is the making of the tool.
Because some theories of knowledge have taken the operations
that yield the known object to be merely mental or psychical
instead of overt redispositions of antecedent subject-matter
(and thus have terminated in some form of "idealism") is no
reason for denying the mediated character of all known
objects.

Thus we are led by another road to the conclusion that the
basic error of traditional theories of knowledge resides in the
isolation and fixation of some phase of the whole process of
inquiry in resolving problematic situations. Sometimes sense-
data are so taken j sometimes, conceptions} sometimes, objects
previously known. An episode in a series of operational acts
is fastened upon, and then in its isolation and consequent frag-
mentary character is made the foundation of the theory of
knowing in its entirety.

Reflective knowing certainly involves identification. But
identity itself has to be defined operationally. There are as
many meanings of identity and identification as there are types
of operation by which they are determined. There is identifi-
cation of an object as a member of a class, of a plant as belong-

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THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY

ing to a certain species: taxonomic identity. The classic theory
of definition took this to be the sole valid type of logical
definition. There are identifications that are historic, that are
concerned with individuals as such. They define the identity
of an individual throughout a series of successive temporal
changes, while the other type is purely static. This kind of
identity is secured by operations that introduce temporal con-
tinuity into what is otherwise discrete: it yields genetic and
generative definitions. For the identity of an individual is
constituted by continued absorption and incorporation of ma-
terials previously external as in the growth of a person, a
nation or a social movement. It demands operations that re-
dispose and organize what antecedently exists. Identifications
effected by inferential operations are of this type. They are
not reductions of the new object or situation to terms of some-
thing already known. Traditional theories treat them as if
they were of the static and subsumptive type.

Hence these theories have no way of accounting for the
discrimination and differentiation, the novel elements, involved
in the conclusions of inferential knowing. They must be viewed
as mere surds, cognitively speaking. Identifications through
processes of temporal growth are, on the contrary, differen-
tiations} new and previously external material is incorporated j
otherwise there is no growth, no development. All reflective
inquiry starts from a problematic situation, and no such situa-
tion can be settled in its own terms. It evolves into a resolved
situation only by means of introduction of material not found
in the situation itself. Imaginative survey, comparison with
things already known, is the first step. This does not eventuate
in complete knowledge, however, until some overt experi-
mental act takes place by means of which an existential in-
corporation and organization is brought about. Merely "men-
tal" revisions remain in the status of thought as distinct from

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

knowledge. Identification through operations that rearrange
what is antecedently given is a process of additive discrimina-
tion} it alone is synthetic in the true sense of that word, in-
volving likeness-and-difference.

Objective idealisms have insisted upon the conjoint pres-
ence of identity and difference in objects of knowledge, as
in the doctrine of the "concrete universal." But they have
ignored the phase of temporal reconstruction with its necessity
for overt existential interaction.

A further implication of the experimental determination
of the known object concerns its office in the verification of
hypotheses. It is often supposed that the value of experiment
lies merely in the fact that it confirms, refutes or modifies a
hypothesis. From the standpoint of the personal interest of
the inquirer such an interpretation often holds good. He is
interested in a theory, and views the eventually disclosed state
of facts solely in its bearing upon the theory he is entertain-
ing. To him, at the time, the cognitive value of the results of
experimental operation lies in the test they afford of the claims
of his hypothesis. Even so, however, verification, or the oppo-
site, is attained only because experimentation effects a transi-
tion of a problematical situation into a resolved one. In this
development new individual objects with new features are
brought to light. As far as the objective course of knowledge
is concerned, as distinct from the personal interest of the
investigator, this result is the important one; in comparison
with it the verification of a hypothesis is secondary and inci-
dental. The institution of a new object of experience is the
essential fact. It would not occur to any one surveying the
body of scientific knowledge as a whole to think that its value
lay in the corroboration it provides for a number of hypoth-
eses. Taken in the large, the significance of the body of sub-
ject-matter as a whole clearly resides in the fact that it marks

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THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY

an added depth, range and fullness of meaning conferred upon
objects of ordinary experience.

This consequence is the only intelligible end that can be
assigned to processes of reflective inquiry. It marks a gain
that during their course hypotheses have gained increased
solidity. But the eventual object of activity with tools is not
to perfect tools, but is found in what tools accomplish, the
products they turn out! When a person working on the basis
of a certain idea succeeds in making an invention, his idea is
verified. But verification was not the purpose of making the
invention, nor does it constitute its value when made. The
same may be said of physicians working upon a certain hy-
pothesis in cure of a disease. Only an ultra-specialist would
regard a successful outcome simply as verification of a theory.
Since a hypothesis is itself instrumental to inquiry, its verifi-
cation cannot constitute the whole significance of inquiry.

Hypotheses which have later been rejected have often
proved serviceable in discovery of new facts, and thus ad-
vanced knowledge. A poor tool is often better than none at
all. It has even been doubted whether any hypothesis ever
entertained has not turned out later to have been erroneous
in important respects. It is still questioned whether many of
the objects of the most valuable and indispensable hypotheses
in present use have actual existence j the existential status of
the electron is still, for example, a matter of controversy. In
many cases, as in the older theory of the nature of atoms, it
is now clear that their worth was independent of the existen-
tial status imputed to their subject-matter j that indeed this
imputation was irrelevant and as far as it went injurious. As
we have seen, progress beyond the Newtonian scheme was
made possible when the ascription of antecedently existing
inherent properties was dropped out, and concepts were re-
garded as designations of operations to be performed.

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

These considerations have a practical importance with re-
spect to the attitude of disdain often affected usually in be-
half of preservation of some dogma toward the course of
science. It is pointed out that scientific men are constantly en-
gaged in furbishing and refurbishing their theories, rejecting
those to which they have been devoted, and putting new ones
in their place only in time to reject these also. Then it is de-
manded why we should put our trust in science self-confessed
to be unstable rather than in some old dogma which men
have continued to believe without change. It is overlooked
that the instability affects the intellectual apparatus which is
employed, conceptions which are frankly hypothetical. What
remains and is not discarded but is added to is the body of
concrete knowledge and of definite controls constructed by
conceptions no longer tenable. No one would dream of re-
flecting adversely upon the evolution of mechanical inven-
tions because the sickle had been discarded for the mowing
machine, and the mechanized tractor substituted for the horse-
drawn mower. We are obviously confronted with betterment of
the instrumentalities that are employed to secure consequences.

The adverse criticism of science just mentioned attaches
only to some of the philosophic interpretations which have
been advanced. If scientific conceptions were valid in the degree
in which they are revelations of antecedent properties of real
Being and existence (as the Newtonian scheme took them to
be), there would be something disturbing in their continual
revamping. The claim of any one of them to be valid would
suffer discredit. Not so, if they are instrumentalities which
direct operations of experimental observations, and if the
knowledge-property resides in conclusions. Fruits remain and
these fruits are the abiding advance of knowledge. Thus the
breaking down of the traditional barrier between theory, sup-
posed to be concerned with prior reality and practice con-

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THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY

cerned with production of consequences, protects the actual
results of theory from cavil.

At the same time, it does away once for all with the
grounds upon which wholesale skeptical and agnostic philoso-
phies have rested. As long as theories of knowledge are framed
in terms of organs assigned to mind or consciousness, whether
sense or reason or any combination of the two, organs occupied,
it is alleged, in reproducing or grasping antecedent reality,
there will continue to exist such generalized skeptical philoso-
phies. Phenomenalism, which holds that impressions and ideas
come between the knower and things to be known, will have
plenty of support as long as sensations and ideas are supposed
to be valid only when they report to mind something prior
to them. Phenomenalism may be objected to on the ground
that data, ideas, essences, are means of knowing, not its ob-
jects. But as long as they are regarded as merely mental
means rather than as means which through overt acts effect
actual redisposition of antecedent things, the retort will have
the character of an arbitrary tour de force; it will be a pious
doctrine rather than a conclusion empirically verified.

It is always in place to be doubtful or skeptical about par-
ticular items of supposed knowledge when evidence to the
contrary presents itself. There is no knowledge self-guaranteed
to be infallible, since all knowledge is the product of special
acts of inquiry. Agnosticism as confession of ignorance about
special matters, in the absence of adequate evidence, is not
only in place under such circumstances but is an act of intel-
lectual honesty. But such skepticism and agnosticism are par-
ticular and depend upon special conditions} they are not whole-
sale} they do not issue from a generalized impeachment of
the adequacy of the organs of knowing to perform their office.
Theories which assume that the knowing subject, that mind
or consciousness, have an inherent capacity to disclose reality,

193

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

a capacity operating apart from any overt interactions of the
organism with surrounding conditions, are invitations to gen-
eral philosophical doubt.

The case stands radically otherwise when it is seen that
"mental" states and acts are organs of knowing things not
directly but through the overt actions which they evoke and
direct. For the consequences of these acts constitute the object
said to be known j and these consequences are public and open.
Doubt and skepticism attach only to the adequacy of the opera-
tions used in achieving the issue which transforms a prob-
lematic situation into a settled or resolved one. Instead of being
impotent and paralyzing, they are opportunities for bettering
concrete methods of inquiry.

Once more, we recur to the problem raised concerning the
possibility of carrying over the essential elements of the pat-
tern of experimental knowing into the experience of man in its
everyday traits. A statement that judgments about regulative
ends and values, the creeds that are to govern conduct in its
important interests, are upon the whole matters of tradition,
dogma and imposition from alleged authorities, hardly re-
quires argument in its support. It is equally patent that skep-
ticism is rife as to the value of purposes and policies of life
thus supplied} the skepticism often extends to complete agnos-
ticism as to the possibility of any regulative ends and stand-
ards whatever. The course of human experience in such matters
is supposed to be inherently chaotic. Even more precious than
the special conclusions of scientific inquiry is its proof that intel-
ligent experimental inquiry is possible which, when it is used,
will develop expansion of ideas and regulation of securely tested
consequences. It is, once more, a hypothesis rather than a settled
fact that extension and transfer of experimental method is gen-
erally possible. But like other hypotheses it is to be tried in
action, and the future history of mankind is at stake in the trial.

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CHAPTER VIII

THE NATURALIZATION OF
INTELLIGENCE

EVERY STUDENT OF philosophy is aware of the number of
seeming impasses into which the theory of knowledge has been
led. There are four general types of subject-matter whose
rival claims to be the objects of true knowledge have to be
either disposed of or in some way accommodated to one an-
other. At one pole, are immediate sense-data which are said
to be the immediate and accordingly most certain objects in
knowledge of existence: the original material from which
knowledge of nature must set out. At the other pole, are
mathematical and logical objects. Somewhere between them
lie the objects of physical science, the products of an elaborate
technique of reflective inquiry. Then there are the objects of
everyday experience, the concrete things of the world in
which we live and which, from the standpoint of our practi-
cal affairs, our enjoyments and sufferings, form the world we
live in. To common sense these are the most important if not
the most real of all objects of knowing. Recent philosophy
has been increasingly occupied with the problems which grow
out of the titles of these various kinds of objects to jurisdic-
tion over the field of knowledge. From some point of view, the
pretensions of each seem to be supreme.

The problem, however, is far from being a purely techni-
cal one. There has been repeated occasion to note that the
claim of physical objects, the objects in which the physical
sciences terminate, to constitute the real nature of the world,

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

places the objects of value with whkh our affections and
choices are concerned at an invidious disadvantage. The mathe-
matician often doubts the claims of physics to be a science in
the full sense of the word} the psychologist may quarrel with
both} and the devotees of physical inquiry are suspicious of
the claims of those who deal with human affairs, historians
and students of social life. The biological subjects which
stand between and form a connecting link are often refused
the title of science if they adopt principles and categories dif-
ferent from those of strict physics. The net practical effect
is the creation of the belief that science exists only in the
things which are most remote from any significant human con-
cern, so that as we approach social and moral questions and
interests we must either surrender hope of the guidance of
genuine knowledge or else purchase a scientific title and
authority at the expense of all that is distinctly human.

Those who have followed the previous discussions will not
be surprised to hear that, from the standpoint of experimental
knowing, all of the rivalries and connected problems grow
from a single root. They spring from the assumption that the
true and valid object of knowledge is that which has being
prior to and independent of the operations of knowing. They
spring from the doctrine that knowledge is a grasp or be-
holding of reality without anything being done to modify its
antecedent state the doctrine which is the source of the sepa-
ration of knowledge from practical activity. If we see that
knowing is not the act of an outside spectator but of a partici-
pator inside the natural and social scene, then the true object
of knowledge resides in the consequences of directed action.
When we take this point of view, if only by way of a hy-
pothesis, the perplexities and difficulties of which we have
been speaking vanish. For on this basis there will be as many
kinds of known objects as there are kinds of effectively con-

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THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE

ducted operations of inquiry which result in the consequences
intended.

The result of one operation will be as good and true an
object of knowledge as is any other, provided it is good at all:
provided, that is, it satisfies the conditions which induced
the inquiry. For if consequences are the object of know-
ing, then an archetypal antecedent reality is not a model to
which the conclusions of inquiry must conform. One might
even go as far as to say that there are as many kinds of
valid knowledge as there are conclusions wherein distinctive
operations have been employed to solve the problems set by
antecedently experienced situations. For operations dealing
with different problems never exactly repeat one another and
do not determine exactly the same consequences. However, as
far as logical theory is concerned, operations fall into certain
kinds or types. It is the bearing of our principle upon the valid-
ity of these kinds that we are directly concerned with.

It is only repeating what has been said to assert that no
problem can be solved without a determination of the data
which define and locate it and which furnish clews or evi-
dence. In so far, when we secure dependable sense-data, we
know truly. Again, the systematic progress of inquiry in deal-
ing with physical problems requires that we determine those
metric properties by means of which correlations of changes
are instituted so as to make predictions possible. These form
the objects of physical science, and if our operations are ade-
quate they are truly known. We develop operations, through
symbols, which connect possible operations with one another}
their outcome gives the formal objects of mathematics and
logic. As consequences of suitable operations these too are truly
known. Finally, when these operations, or some combination
of them, are used to solve the problems which arise in con-
nection with the things of ordinary perceived and enjoyed

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

objects, the latter, as far as they are consequences of these
operations, are themselves truly known. We know whenever
we do knowj that is, whenever our inquiry leads to conclusions
which settle the problem out of which it grew. This truism
is the end of the whole matter upon the condition that we
frame our theory of knowledge in accord with the pattern set
by experimental methods.

The conclusions, however, are not truisticj they certainly
are not trivial. The more complex the conditions with which
operations are concerned, the fuller and richer are their con-
sequences. Consequently, the more significant, although not the
truer, is the resulting knowledge. The advantage of physical
knowledge depends upon the fact that it deals with fewer
conditions, those of a narrower and more isolated range, by
means of operations that are more precise and more technical.
There is no difference in principle between knowledge of them
and knowledge of the most complex human affairs, but there
is a decided practical difference. To be an object of specifically
physical knowledge is the same thing as being an object of
operations that discriminate definitely fundamental relations
of the experienced world from others, and that deal with them
in their discriminated character. The gain is great. But the
objects thus known lay no claim to be final. When used
as factors for inquiring into phenomena of life and society
they become instrumental j they cease to be inclusive, and
become part of a method for understanding more complex
phenomena.

From this point of view, the objects of our common sense
world (by which is signified that in which we live, with our
loves and hates, our defeats and achievements, our choices,
strivings and enjoyments) have a double status. When they
precede operations of competent directed inquiry, they are not
matters of knowledge j they are expeHenced just as they

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happen to occur. They thus set problems for inquiry, problems
of varied scope. But they are of such a nature that things of
the most limited range, the purely physical, are the first to be
successfully dealt with. But in the degree in which fuller and
more complex social and moral affairs which of course in-
clude physical and biological conditions and relations within
themselves are transformed by becoming consequences of
operations made possible by the limited forms of knowing,
they also are objects of knowledge. While they are not more
real, they are richer and more significant objects than are those
of any other type of knowledge.

The special results of science are always finding their way
back into the natural and social environment of daily life and
modifying it. This fact does not of itself cause the latter to
be known objects. A typical example is the effect of physical
science upon a worker in a factory} he may merely become an
attachment to a machine for a number of hours a day. Physi-
cal science has had its effect in changing social conditions.
But there has been no correspondingly significant increase of
intelligent understanding. The application of physical knowl-
edge has taken place in a technical way for the sake of limited
consequences. But when the operations in which physical science
is used are such as to transform distinctively human values in
behalf of a human interest, those who participate in these
consequences have a knowledge of the things of ordinary per-
ception, use and enjoyment as genuine and fuller and deeper
than that of the scientist in his laboratory. Were we to define
science not in the usual technical way, but as a knowledge
that accrues when methods are employed which deal com-
petently with problems that present themselves, the
physician, engineer, artist, craftsman, lay claim to scientific
knowing.

These statements go contrary to the philosophic tradition.

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They do so for just one reason. They rest upon the idea that
known objects exist as the consequences of directed operations,
not because of conformity of thought or observation with
something antecedent. We may, for reasons which I hope will
appear later, give the name intelligence to these directed
operations. Using this term, we may say that the worth of
any object that lays claim to being an object of knowledge is
dependent upon the intelligence employed in reaching it. In
saying this, we must bear in mind that intelligence means
operations actually performed in the modification of condi-
tions, including all the guidance that is given by means of
ideas, both direct and symbolic.

The statement may sound strange. But it is only a way
of saying that the value of any cognitive conclusion depends
upon the method by which it is reached, so that the perfecting
of method, the perfecting of intelligence, is the thing of su-
preme value. If we judge the work of a scientific inquirer by
what he does and not by his speech when he talks about his
work (when he is likely to talk in terms of traditional notions
that have become habitual) we shall have little difficulty, I
think, in accepting the idea that he determines the cognitive
claims of anything presented to him on the basis of the method
by which it is reached. The import of this doctrine is simple.
It becomes complicated, however, the moment we contrast
it with the doctrines which have dominated thought. For
these all rest on the notion that a reality in Being indepen-
dently of the operations of inquiry is the standard and meas-
ure of anything said to be known. Viewed in this connection,
the conception just advanced involves hardly less than a revo-
lutionary transformation of many of our most cherished con-
victions. The essential difference is that between a mind which
beholds or grasps objects from outside the world of things,
physical and social, and one which is a participant, interacting

2OO

THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE

with other things and knowing them provided the interaction
is regulated in a definable way.

In discussion up to this point we have depended upon the
general pattern of experimental knowing. It is asserted that
when we frame our theory of knowledge and the known object
after this pattern, the conclusion is inevitable. But the point
is of such importance that we may gratefully acknowledge the
support given the conclusion by one of the definite conclusions
reached in recent physical science. For this one result is of a
crucially decisive nature. It is known technically as Heisen-
berg's principle of indeterminancy. The basic philosophy of
the Newtonian system of the universe is closely connected with
what is termed the principle of canonic conjugates. The fun-
damental principle of the mechanical philosophy of nature is
that it is possible to determine exactly (in principle if not
in actual practice) both the position and the velocity of any
body. Knowing this for each particle which enters into any
change, as a motion, it is possible to calculate mathematically,
that is exactly, just what will happen. The laws or physical
equations that express the relations of the particles and bodies
under different conditions are then assumed to be a "govern-
ing" framework of nature to which all particular phenomena
conform. Knowing volumes and momenta in a particular case
we can by the aid of fixed laws predict the subsequent course
of events.

The philosophy in question assumed that these positions
and velocities are there in nature independent of our knowing,
of our experiments and observations, and that we have scien-
tific knowledge in the degree in which we ascertain them
exactly. The future and the past belong to the same com-
pletely determinate and fixed scheme. Observations, when cor-
rectly conducted, merely register this fixed state of changes
according to laws of objects whose essential properties are

2O I

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

fixed. The implications of the positions are expressed in La-
place's well-known saying that were there a knowledge (in
mechanical terms) of the state of the universe at any one time
its whole future could be predicted or deduced. It is this
philosophy which Heisenberg's principle has upset, a feet
implied in calling it a principle of indeterminancy.

It is true that critics had attacked the Newtonian scheme
on the basis of a logical flaw in it. It first postulates that the
position and velocity of any particle can be determined in
isolation from all others. Then it postulates that there is a
complete and continuous interaction of all these particles with
one another. Logically, the two postulates nullify each other.
But as long as the principles involved gave satisfactory results
this objection was brushed aside or ignored. Heisenberg's prin-
ciple compels a recognition of the fact that interaction prevents
an accurate measurement of velocity and position for any body,
the demonstration centering about the role of the interaction
of the observer in determining what actually happens.

The scientific data and the mathematical reasonings which
led him to his conclusion are technical. But fortunately they
do not concern us. The logic of the matter is not complicated.
He showed that if we fix, metrically, velocity, then there is a
range of indeterminateness in the assignment of position, and
vice-versa. When one is fixed, the other is defined only within
a specified limit of probability. The element of indeterminate-
ness is not connected with defect in the method of observa-
tion but is intrinsic. The particle observed does not have fixed
position or velocity, for it is changing all the time because
of interaction: specifically, in this case, interaction with the
act of observing, or more strictly, with the conditions under
which an observation is possible; for it is not the "mental"
phase of observation which makes the difference. Since either
position or velocity may be fixed at choice, leaving the element

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THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE

of indeterminancy on the other side, both of them are shown
to be conceptual in nature. That is, they belong to our intellec-
tual apparatus for dealing with antecedent existence, not to
fixed properties of that existence. An isolation of a particle
for measurement is essentially a device for regulation of sub-
sequent perceptual experience.

Technically, the principle of Heisenberg is connected with
recent determinations regarding observation of phenomena of
light. The principle as far as the role of the conditions of
observation is concerned is simple. We should all, I suppose,
recognize that when we perceive an object by means of touch,
the contact introduces a slight modification in the thing
touched. Although in dealing with large bodies this change
would be insignificant, it would be considerable if we touched
a minute body and one moving at high speed. It might be
thought that we could calculate the displacement thus ef-
fected, and by making allowances for it determine exactly the
position and momentum of the thing touched. But this result
would be theoretical, and would have to be confirmed by an-
other observation. The effect of the last observation cannot
be eliminated. Failure to generalize this conclusion was due
presumably to two facts. Until recently physics dealt mainly
with bodies of relatively large volume and relatively low
velocity. Experiences with these bodies were carried over to
minute particles of any velocity j these were treated as mathe-
matical points located at fixed, unchanging, instants of time.
The second cause is that vision does not involve interaction
with the thing seen as obviously as does touch.

But the situation changed when it came to dealing with
minute bodies moving at high speed. Also, it became clear
that a continuous field or even flow of light cannot be ob-
served and measured. Light can be observed only as an indi-
vidual object, a drop, pellet or bullet. The presence of at

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

least one such bullet is required to make, say, an electron
visible, and its action displaces to some extent the object ob-
served j the displacement or jog, being involved in the obser-
vation, cannot be measured by it. As Bridgman says: "A cat
may look at a king but at least one bullet of light must pass
if any light at all passes, and the King cannot be observed with-
out the exertion of that minimum amount of mechanical re-
pulsion which corresponds to the single bullet." *

To a layman the full import of the discovery may not
seem at first sight very great. In the subject-matter of scientific
thought it calls for only slight changes of formulation, in-
significant for all macroscopic bodies. The change for the un-
derlying philosophy and logic of science is, however, very
great. In relation to the metaphysics of the Newtonian system
it is hardly less than revolutionary. What is known is seen to
be a product in which the act of observation plays a neces-
sary role. Knowing is seen to be a participant in what is finally
known. Moreover, the metaphysics of existence as something
fixed and therefore capable of literally exact mathematical
description and prediction is undermined. Knowing is, for
philosophical theory, a case of specially directed activity in-
stead of something isolated from practice. The quest for cer-
tainty by means of exact possession in mind of immutable
reality is exchanged for search for security by means of active
control of the changing course of events. Intelligence in op-
eration, another name for method, becomes the thing most
worth winning.

The principle of indeterminancy thus presents itself as
the final step in the dislodgment of the old spectator theory
of knowledge. It marks the acknowledgment, within scientific
procedure itself, of the fact that knowing is one kind of inter-

*In the March, 1929, number of Harper's Magazine, in an article entitled
The New Vision of Science.

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THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE

action which goes on within the world. Knowing marks the
conversion of undirected changes into changes directed toward
an intended conclusion. There are left for philosophy but two
alternatives. Either knowledge defeats its own purpose; or the
objective of knowing is the consequences of operations pur-
posely undertaken, provided they fulfill the conditions for the
sake of which they are carried on. If we persist in the tradi-
tional conception, according to which the thing to be known is
something which exists prior to and wholly apart from the act
of knowing, then discovery of the fact that the act of observa-
tion, necessary in existential knowing, modifies that pre-
existent something, is proof that the act of knowing gets in its
own way, frustrating its own intent. If knowing is a form of
doing and is to be judged like other modes by its eventual
issue, this tragic conclusion is not forced upon us. Fundamen-
tally, the issue is raised whether philosophy is willing to sur-
render a theory of mind and its organs of knowing which
originated when the practice of knowing was in its infancy.

One important result of acknowledgment of the philo-
sophic modification involved in the principle of indetermi-
nancy is a definite change in our conception of natural laws.
The individually observed case becomes the measure of knowl-
edge. Laws are intellectual instrumentalities by which that
individual object is instituted and its meaning determined.
This change involves a reversal of the theory which has domi-
nated thought since the Newtonian system obtained full sway.
According to the latter, the aim of science is to ascertain laws;
individual cases are known only as they are reduced to instances
of laws. For, as we saw earlier, the Newtonian philosophy
allowed itself to become entangled in the Greek metaphysics
according to which the immutable is the truly real and our
thought is adequate in the degree in which it approximates a
grasp of what is antecedently fixed in existence.

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

In content, or subject-matter, Newton's philosophy ef-
fected a revolutionary change. The unchanging reality had
been thought to consist of forms and species. According to
Newtonian science, it consists of fixed relations, temporal and
spatial, designated by exact enumeration of changes between
fixed ultimate substances, the masses of atoms. The discovery
that mass varies with velocity was the beginning of the end.
It deprived physical knowledge of its supposedly ultimate
permanent coefficient, one having nothing to do with config-
uration or motion, and one in terms of which all interactions
were to be exactly described. All "laws" were statements of
these ultimate and rigid uniformities of being. While perhaps
there was felt to be something metaphorical in speaking
of laws as if they "governed" changes and of the latter as
if they "obeyed" laws, there was nothing figurative in the
notion that laws stated the ultimate unchanging properties of
natural existence, and that all individual cases, those observed,
were only specimen instances of the antecedent properties of
the real world formulated in laws. The principle of indeter-
minancy brings to fruition the scientific transformation initi-
ated in the discovery that the supposition of a permanent
coefficient of mass is illusory a survival, when judged in his-
torical terms, of the old notion that something immutable is
the true object of knowledge.

In technical statement, laws on the new basis are formulae
for the 'prediction of the 'probability of an observable occur-
rence. They are designations of relations sufficiently stable to
allow of the occurrence of forecasts of individualized situa-
tions for every observed phenomenon is individual within
limits of specified probability, not a probability of error, but of
probability of actual occurrence. Laws are inherently concep-
tual in character, as is shown in the fact that either position or
velocity may be fixed at will. To call them conceptual is not to

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THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE

say that they are merely "mental" and arbitrary. It is to say
that they are relations which are thought not observed. The
subject-matter of the conceptions which constitute laws is not
arbitrary, for it is determined by the interactions of what
exists. But determination of them is very different from that
denoted by conformity to fixed properties of unchanging
substances. Any instrument which is to operate effectively in
existence must take account of what exists, from a fountain pen
to a self-binding reaper, a locomotive or an airplane. But
"taking account of," paying heed to, is something quite differ-
ent from literal conformity to what is already in being. It is
an adaptation of what previously existed to accomplishment of
a purpose.

The eventual purpose in knowledge is observation of a new
phenomenon, an object actually experienced by way of per-
ception. Thus the supposed immutable law supposed to govern
phenomena becomes a way of transacting business effectively
with concrete existences, a mode of regulation of our relations
with them. There is no difference in principle between their use
in "pure" science and in an art. We may recur to the case of
a physician to which reference was made. The physician in
diagnosing a case of disease deals with something individ-
ualized. He draws upon a store of general principles of
physiology, etc., already at command. Without this store of
conceptual material he is helpless. But he does not attempt to
reduce the case to an exact specimen of certain laws of physiol-
ogy and pathology, or do away with its unique individuality.
Rather he uses general statements as aids to direct his obser-
vation of the particular case, so as to discover what it is like.
They function as intellectual tools or instrumentalities.

The recognition that laws are means of calculating the
probability of observation of an event signifies that in basic
logic there is no difference in the two kinds of cases. The full

207

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

and eventual reality of knowledge is carried in the individ-
ual case, not in general laws isolated from use in giving an
individual case its meaning. Thus the empirical or observa-
tional theory of knowledge comes to its own, although in quite
a different way from that imagined by traditional empiricism.

It is an old remark that human progress is a zigzag affair.
The idea of a universal reign of law, based on properties im-
mutably inhering in things and of such a nature as to be capable
of exact mathematical statement was a sublime idea. It dis-
placed once for all the notion of a world in which the unac-
countable and the mysterious have the first and last word, a
world in which they constantly insert themselves. It estab-
lished the ideal of regularity and uniformity in place of the
casual and sporadic. It gave men inspiration and guidance in
seeking for uniformities and constancies where only irregular
diversity was experienced. The ideal extended itself from the
inanimate world to the animate and then to social affairs. It
became, it may fairly be said, the great article of faith in
the creed of scientific men. From this point of view, the
principle of indeterminancy seems like an intellectual catas-
trophe. In compelling surrender of the doctrine of exact and
immutable laws describing the fixed antecedent properties of
things, it seems to involve abandonment of the idea that the
world is fundamentally intelligible. A universe in which fixed
laws do not make possible exact predictions seems from the
older standpoint to be a world in which disorder reigns.

The feeling is psychologically natural. But it arises from
the hold which intellectual habits have over us. The traditional
conception displaced in fact lingers in imagination as a picture
of what the world ought to bej we are uneasy because the fact
turns out not to be in accord with the picture in our minds,
As a matter of fact, the change, viewed in a perspective of dis-
tance, is nothing like so upsetting. All the facts that were ever

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THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE

known are still known, and known with greater accuracy than
before. The older doctrine was in effect an offshoot not of
science but of a metaphysical doctrine which taught that the
immutable is the truly real, and of a theory of knowledge
which held that rational conceptions rather than observations
are the vehicle of knowledge. Newton foisted a fundamental
"rationalism" upon the scientific world all the more effectually
because he did it in the name of empirical observation.

Moreover, like all generalizations which go beyond the
range of possible as well as of actual experience, a price was
paid for the sublime and inspiring ideal of a reign of uni-
versal and exact law: the sacrifice of the individual to the
general, of the concrete to the relational. Spinoza's magnifi-
cently sweeping dictum that "the order and connection of ideas
is the order and connection of things" was in effect, although
not avowedly as it was with Spinoza, the current measure of
the intelligibility of nature. And a universe whose essential
characteristic is fixed order and connection has no place for
unique and individual existences, no place for novelty and
genuine change and growth. It is, in the words of William
James, a block universe. The fact that in detailed content it
is a thoroughly mechanistic world is, one may say, a mere
incident attending the fact that it is a fixed and closed world.

Probably everyone has heard of the child who expressed
surprise at the fact that rivers or bodies of water are always
located conveniently near great cities. Suppose every one had
had engrained in his mind the notion that cities, like rivers,
are works of nature. Suppose it was then suddenly ascertained
that cities were man made and were located near bodies of
water in order that the activities of men in industry and com-
merce might be better carried on and human purposes and
needs be better served. We can imagine that the discovery
would bring with it a shock. It would be upsetting because

209

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

it would seem unnatural} for the ordinary measure of the
natural is psychological j it is what we have become accustomed
to. But in time the new idea in becoming familiar would also
become "natural." If men had always previously conceived of
the connection between cities and rivers as one which was in-
trinsic and fixed by nature, instead of being a product of human
art, it is moreover probable that in time a liberation would be
experienced by discovery that the contrary was the case. Men
would be led to take fuller advantage of the facilities afforded
by natural conditions. These would be used in new and more
diversified ways when it was realized that cities were near
them because of and for the sake of the uses they provide.

The analogy suggested seems to me close. From the stand-
point of traditional notions, it appears that nature, intrin-
sically, is Irrational. But the quality of irrationality is imputed
only because of conflict with a prior definition of ration-
ality. Abandon completely the notion that nature ought to
conform to a certain definition, and nature intrinsically is
neither rational nor irrational. Apart from the use made of
it in knowing, it exists in a dimension irrelevant to either
attribution, just as rivers inherently are neither located near
cities nor are opposed to such location. Nature is intelligible
and understand^/*?. There are operations by means of which
it becomes an object of knowledge, and is turned to human
purposes, just as rivers provide conditions which may be
utilized to promote human activities and to satisfy human
need.

Moreover, just as commerce, carried on by natural bodies
of water, signifies interactions within nature, by which changes
are affected in natural conditions the building of docks and
harbors, erection of warehouses and factories, construction of
steamships and also in invention of new modes of interaction
so with knowing and knowledge. The organs, instrumentali-

2IO

THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE

ties and operations of knowing are inside nature, not outside.
Hence they are changes of what previously existed: the object
of knowledge is a constructed, existentially produced, object.
The shock to the traditional notion that knowledge is perfect
in the degree in which it grasps or beholds without change
some thing previously complete in itself is tremendous. But
in effect it only makes us aware of what we have always done,
as far as ever we have actually succeeded in knowing: it clears
away superfluous and irrelevant accompaniments and it con-
centrates attention upon the agencies which are actually effec-
tive in obtaining knowledge, eliminating waste and making
actual knowing more controllable. It installs man, thinking
man, within nature.

The doctrine that nature is inherently rational was a costly
one. It entailed the idea that reason in man is an outside spec-
tator of a rationality already complete in itself. It deprived
reason in man of an active and creative office; its business was
simply to copy, to re-present symbolically, to view a given
rational structure. Ability to make a transcript of this structure
in mathematical formulas gives great delight to those who
have the required ability. But it does nothing; it makes no
difference in nature. In effect, it limits thought in man to
retraversing in cognition a pattern fixed and complete in itself.
The doctrine was both an effect of the traditional separation
between knowledge and action and a factor in perpetuating it.
It relegated practical making and doing to a secondary and
relatively irrational realm.

Its paralyzing effect on human action is seen in the part
it played in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in the
theory of "natural laws" in human affairs, in social matters.
These natural laws were supposed to be inherently fixed; a
science of social phenomena and relations was equivalent to
discovery of them. Once discovered, nothing remained for

211

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

man but to conform to themj they were to rule his conduct as
physical laws govern physical phenomena. They were the sole
standard of conduct in economic affairs} the laws of economics
are the "natural" laws of all political action j other so-called
laws are artificial, man-made contrivances in contrast with the
normative regulations of nature itself.

Laissez-faire was the logical conclusion. For organized
society to attempt to regulate the course of economic affairs,
to bring them into service of humanly conceived ends, was a
harmful interference.

This doctrine is demonstratively the offspring of that con-
ception of universal laws that phenomena must observe which
was a heritage of the Newtonian philosophy. But if man in
knowing is a participator in the natural scene, a factor in gen-
erating things known, the fact that man participates as a factor
in social affairs is no barrier to knowledge of them. On the
contrary, a certain method of directed participation is a pre-
condition of his having any genuine understanding. Human
intervention for the sake of effecting ends is no interference,
and it is a means of knowledge.

There is thus involved more than a verbal shift if we say
that the new scientific development effects an exchange of
reason for intelligence. In saying this, "reason" has the tech-
nical meaning given to it in classic philosophic tradition, the
nous of the Greeks, the mtellectus of the scholastics. In this
meaning, it designates both an inherent immutable order of
nature, superempirical in character, and the organ of mind by
which this universal order is grasped. In both respects, reason
is with respect to changing things the ultimate fixed standard
the law physical phenomena obey, the norm human action
should obey. For the marks of "reason" in its traditional sense
are necessity, universality, superiority to change, domination
of the occurrence and the understanding of change.

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THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE

Intelligence on the other hand is associated with judgment;
jhat is, with selection and arrangement of means to effect con-
sequences and with choice of what we take as our ends. A man
is intelligent not in virtue of having reason which grasps first
and indemonstrable truths about fixed principles, in order to
reason deductively from them to the particulars which they
govern, but in virtue of his capacity to estimate the possibili-
ties of a situation and to act in accordance with his estimate.
In the large sense of the term, intelligence is as practical as
reason is theoretical. Wherever intelligence operates, things
are judged in their capacity of signs of other things. If scien-
tific knowledge enables us to estimate more accurately the
worth of things as signs, we can afford to exchange a loss of
theoretical certitude for a gain in practical judgment. For if
we can judge events as indications of other events, we can
prepare in all cases for the coming of what is anticipated. In
some cases, we can forestall a happening j desiring one event
to happen rather than another, we can intentionally set about
institution of those changes which our best knowledge tells us
to be connected with that which we are after.

What has been lost in the theoretical possibility of exact
knowledge and exact prediction is more than compensated for
by the fact that the knowing which occurs within nature in-
volves possibility of direction of change. This conclusion gives
intelligence a foothold and a function within nature which
"reason" never possessed. That which acts outside of nature
and is a mere spectator of it is, by definition, not a participator
in its changes. Therefore it is debarred from taking part in
directing them. Action may follow but it is only an external
attachment to knowing, not an inherent factor in it. As a me-
chanical addendum, it is inferior to knowledge. Moreover, it
must either issue automatically from knowledge or else there
must be some intervening act of "will" to produce it. In any

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

case, because of its externality it adds nothing to intelligence or
knowledge. It can only increase personal shrewdness in pru-
dential manipulation of conditions.

We may, indeed, engage during knowing in experimenta-
tion. But according to the classic logic the effect was not to
reorganize prior conditions, but merely to bring about a change
in our own subjective or mental attitude. The act no more
entered into the constitution of the known object than travel-
ing to Athens to see the Parthenon had any effect on archi-
tecture. It makes a change in our own personal attitude
and posture so that we can see better what was there all the
time. It is a practical concession to the weakness of our powers
of apprehension. The whole scheme hangs together with the
traditional depreciation of practical activity on the part of the
intellectual class. In reality, it also condemns intelligence to a
position of impotency. Its exercise is an enjoyable use of
leisure. The doctrine of its supreme value is largely a com-
pensation for the impotency that attached to it in contrast with
the force of executive acts.

The realization that the observation necessary to knowl-
edge enters into the natural object known cancels this separa-
tion of knowing and doing. It makes possible and it demands
a theory in which knowing and doing are intimately connected
with each other. Hence, as we have said, it domesticates the
exercise of intelligence within nature. This is part and parcel
of nature's own continuing interactions. Interactions go on
anyway and produce changes. Apart from intelligence, these
changes are not directed. They are effects but not consequences,
for consequences imply means deliberately employed. When
an interaction intervenes which directs the course of change,
the scene of natural interaction has a new quality and dimen-
sion. This added type of interaction is intelligence. The intelli-
gent activity of man is not something brought to bear upon

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THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE

nature from without j it is nature realizing its own potentiali-
ties in behalf of a fuller and richer issue of events. Intelli-
gence within nature means liberation and expansion, as reason
outside of nature means fixation and restriction.

The change does not mean that nature has lost intelligi-
bility. It rather signifies that we are in position to realize that
the term intelligible is to be understood literally. It expresses
a potentiality rather than an actuality. Nature is capable of
being understood. But the possibility is realized not by a mind
thinking about it from without but by operations conducted
from within, operations which give it new relations summed
up in production of a new individual object. Nature has intel-
ligible order as its possession in the degree in which we by
our own overt operations realize potentialities contained in it.
The change from intrinsic rationality in the traditional sense
to an intelligibility to be realized by human action places
responsibility upon human beings. The devotion we show to
the ideal of intelligence determines the extent in which the
actual order of nature is congenial to mind.

These conclusions connect directly with the question raised
at the outset of this chapter. When knowledge is defined from
the standpoint of a reality to which the conclusions of thought
must accommodate themselves, as a photograph must be faith-
ful to its original, there will always be disputes as to whether
this or that subject can possibly be treated scientifically. But
if the measure of knowledge is the quality of intelligence
manifested in dealing with problems presented by any expe-
rienced subject-matter, the issue takes on a different aspect.
The question always at issue is the possibility of developing
a method adequate to cope with problems. The conclusions of
physical knowledge do indeed set a standard for knowing. But
it is because of their elaboration of competent method that
this statement is true, not because of any superior claim to

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

reality on the part of physical subject-matter. All materials
of experience are equally real} that is, all are existential; each
has a right to be dealt with in terms of its own especial char-
acteristics and its own problems. To use philosophical termi-
nology, each type of subject-matter is entitled to its own
characteristic categories, according to the questions it raises and
the operations necessary to answer them.

The difference between various types of knowledge thus
turns out to be a difference in fullness and range of conditions
involved in subject-matter dealt with. When one considers the
success of astronomy in attaining understanding of phenomena
occurring at enormous distances one may well be lost in admi-
ration. But we should also reflect upon how much is omitted
from inquiry and conclusion. Our knowledge of human affairs
on this earth is inexact and unorganized as compared with
some things which we know about bodies distant many, many,
light years. But there are vast multitudes of things about these
bodies that astronomy makes no pretense of inquiring into.
The relative perfection of its conclusions is connected with the
strict limitation of the problems it deals with. The case of
astronomy is typical of physical science in general as compared
with knowledge of human affairs. The essence of the latter is
that we cannot indulge in the selective abstractions that are
the secret of the success of physical knowing. When we intro-
duce a like simplification into social and moral subjects we
eliminate the distinctively human factors: reduction to the
physical ensues.

The principle is exemplified in the difference which is
found between results obtained in the laboratory and in manu-
facturing processes carried on for commercial purposes. The
same materials and relations may be involved. But under lab-
oratory conditions elements are isolated and treated under a
control not possible in the factory, where the same rigid isola-

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THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE

tion would defeat the aim of cheap production on a large
scale. Nevertheless, in the end, the researches of scientific in-
quiries transform industrial production. Possibilities of new
operations are suggested, and the laboratory results indicate
ways of eliminating wasteful operations and make manifest
conditions which have to be attended to. Artificial simplifica-
tion or abstraction is a necessary 'precondition of securing ability
to deal with affairs which are complex, in which there are many
more variables and where strict isolation destroys the special
characteristics of the subject-matter. This statement conveys
the important distinction which exists between physical and
social and moral objects. The distinction is one of methods
of operation not of kinds of reality.

In other words, what is meant by "physical" in distinction
from other adjectives that are prefixed to subject-matter is
precisely an abstraction of a limited range of conditions and
relations out of a total complex. The same principle applies to
mathematical objects. The use of symbols designating possible
operations makes possible a greater degree of exactness and
intellectual organization. There is no disparagement of ab-
straction involved. Abstraction is simply an instance of the
economy and efficiency involved in all intelligent practice:
Deal first with matters that can be effectively handled, and
then use the results to go on to cope with more complex affairs.
Objection comes in, and comes in with warranted force, when
the results of an abstractive operation are given a standing
which belongs only to the total situation from which they
have been selected. All specialization breeds a familiarity
which tends to create an illusion. Material dealt with by
specialized abstractive processes comes to have a psychological
independence and completion which is converted hyposta-
tized into objective independence and self-sufficiency.

In addition there is a definite social reason for abstractive

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

simplification. Intercourse of human individuals with one
another makes it necessary to find common ground. Just
because individuals are individuals, there is much in the expe-
rience of each which is unique j being incommunicable in and
of itself, it is in so far a bar to entering into relations with
others. For the purposes of communication, dissection is
necessary. Otherwise the personal element is a bar to agree-
ment and understanding. If one follows out this line of
thought, it will be evident that the more widely extended is
the notion of mutual comprehensibility, the more completely
all individual traits tend to get excluded from the object of
thought. In arriving at statements which hold for all possible
experiencers and observers under all possible varying indi-
vidual circumstances we arrive at that which is most remote
from any one concrete experience. In this sense, the abstrac-
tions of mathematics and physics represent the common de-
nominators in all things experienceable. Taken by themselves
they seem to present a ca$ut mortuum. Erected into complete
statements of reality as such, they become hallucinatory obses-
sions. But in practice, there is always an accompanying reverse
movement. These generalized findings are employed to enrich
the meanings of individualized experiences, and to afford,
within limits of probability, an increased control of them.

It is in this sense that all reflective knowledge as such is
instrumental. The beginning and the end is the things of gross
everyday experience. But apart from knowledge the things of
our ordinary experience are fragmentary, casual, unregulated
by purpose, full of frustrations and barriers. In the language
previously used, they are problematic, obstructive, and chal-
lenges to thought. By ignoring for a time their concrete and
qualitative fullness, by making abstractions and generalizations,
we ascertain certain basic relations upon which occurrence of
the things experienced depend. We treat them as mere events,

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THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE

that is, as changes brought about in a system of relationships,
ignoring their individualizing qualities. But the qualities are
still there, are still experienced, although as such they are not
the objects of knowledge. But we return from abstractive
thought to experience of them with added meaning and with
increased power to regulate our relations to them.

Reflective knowledge is the only means of regulation. Its
value as instrumental is unique. Consequently philosophers,
themselves occupied in a fascinating branch of reflective knowl-
edge, have isolated knowledge and its results. They have
ignored its context of origin and function and made it coexten-
sive with all valid experience. The doctrine was thus formed
that all experience of worth is inherently cognitive} that other
modes of experienced objects are to be tested, not here and
there as occasion demands but universally by reduction to the
terms of known objects. This assumption of the proper ubiq-
uity of knowledge is the great intellectualistic fallacy. It is the
source of all disparagement of everyday qualitative experience,
practical, esthetic, moral. It is the ultimate source of the doc-
trine that calls subjective and phenomenal all objects of ex-
perience that cannot be reduced to properties of objects of
knowledge.

From this derogation of the things we experience by way
of love, desire, hope, fear, purpose and the traits character-
istic of human individuality, we are saved by the realization
of the purposefully instrumental and abstract character of
objects of reflective knowledge. One mode of experience is as
real as any other. But apart from the exercise of intelligence
which yields knowledge, the realities of our emotional and
practical life have fragmentary and inconsistent meanings and
are at the mercy of forces beyond our control. We have no
choice save to accept them or to flee from them. Experience of
that phase of objects which is constituted by their relations,

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

their interactions, with one another, m?kes possible a new way
of dealing with them, and thus eventually creates a new kind
of experienced objects, not more real than those which
preceded but more significant, and less overwhelming and
oppressive.

Thus the recognition that intelligence is a method oper-
ating within the world places physical knowledge in respect
to other kinds of knowing. It deals with those relations which
are of the broadest scope. It affords a sure foundation for
other more specialized forms of knowing: not in the sense
that these must be reduced to the objects in which physical
knowledge terminates, but in the sense that the latter supply
intellectual points of departure, and suggest operations to be
employed. There is no kind of inquiry which has a monopoly
of the honorable title of knowledge. The engineer, the artist,
the historian, the man of affairs attain knowledge in the degree
they employ methods that enable them to solve the problems
which develop in the subject-matter they are concerned with.
As philosophy framed upon the pattern of experimental in-
quiry does away with all wholesale skepticism, so it eliminates
all invidious monopolies of the idea of science. By their fruits
we shall know them.

The marking off of certain conclusions as alone truly
science, whether mathematical or physical, is an historical
incident. It sprang originally from man's desire for a certainty
and peace which he could not attain practically in the absence
of the arts of management and direction of natural conditions.
When modern physical inquiry began, it had a hard time to
get a hearing, or even to be permitted to carry on. The temp-
tation was practically irresistible to treat it as an exclusive and
esoteric undertaking. Moreover, as it progressed, it required
more and more specialized technical preparation. The motive
of defense from social attack and the motive of glorification

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THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE

of a specialized calling conspired together. All the eulogistic
connotations that gather about "truth" were called into play.

Thus "science," meaning physical knowledge, became a
kind of sanctuary. A religious atmosphere, not to say an idola-
trous one, was created. "Science" was set apart j its findings
were supposed to have a privileged relation to the real. In
fact, the painter may know colors as well as the physicist} the
poet may know stars, rain and clouds as well as the meteorolo-
gist j the statesman, educator and dramatist may know human
nature as truly as the professional psychologist} the farmer
may know soils and plants as truly as the botanist and min-
erologist. For the criterion of knowledge lies in the method
used to secure consequences and not in metaphysical concep-
tions of the nature of the real. Nevertheless in the end think-
ers in all lines are dependent upon the mathematician and the
physical inquirer for perfecting of the tools employed in their
respective callings.

That "knowledge" has many meanings follows from the
operational definition of conceptions. There are as many con-
ceptions of knowledge as there are distinctive operations by
which problematic situations are resolved. When it is asserted
that reflective knowledge as such is instrumental, it is not
meant that there is an a priori form of non-reflective knowl-
edge, one which is immediately given. What is signified is that
there is a direct possession and enjoyment of meanings to be had
in that experience of objects which issues from reflective
knowledge. It is futile to argue whether the conclusions of
reflective method as such or the eventual objects enriched in
meaning which are capable of direct perception and use more
truly deserve the title of knowledge. It is congenial to our
idiom to call the reflective conclusions of competent methods
by the name of science. But science thus conceived is not a final
thing. The final thing is appreciation and use of things of

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

direct experience. These are known in as far as their constitu-
ents and their form are the result of science. But they are also
more than science. They are natural objects experienced in
relations and continuities that are summed up in rich and
definite individual forms

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CHAPTER IX
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

UNCERTAINTY is PRIMARILY a practical matter. It signifies
uncertainty of the issue of present experiences; these are
fraught with future peril as well as inherently objectionable.
Action to get rid of the objectionable has no warrant of success
and is itself perilous. The intrinsic troublesome and uncertain
quality of situations lies in the fact that they hold outcomes in
suspense; they move to evil or to good fortune. The natural
tendency of man is to do something at oncej there is impatience
with suspense, and lust for immediate action. When action
lacks means for control of external conditions, it takes the form
of acts which are the prototypes of rite and cult. Intelligence
signifies that direct action has become indirect. It continues to
be overt, but it is directed into channels of examination of con-
ditions, and doings that are tentative and preparatory. Instead
of rushing to "do something about it," action centers upon find-
ing out something about obstacles and resources and upon pro-
jecting inchoate later modes of definite response. Thinking
has been well called deferred action. But not all action is de-
ferred; only that which is final and in so far productive of
irretrievable consequences. Deferred action is present explora-
tory action.

The first and most obvious effect of this change in the quality
of action is that the dubious or problematic situation becomes
a problem. The risky character that pervades a situation as a
whole is translated into an object of inquiry that locates what
the trouble is, and hence facilitates projection of methods and

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

means of dealing with it. Only after expertness has been gained
in special fields of inquiry does the mind set out at once from
problems: even then in novel cases, there is a preliminary
period of groping through a situation which is characterized
throughout by confusion, instead of presenting a clear-cut
problem for investigation.

Many definitions of mind and thinking have been given.
I know of but one that goes to the heart of the matter:
response to the doubtful as such. No inanimate thing reacts
to things as problematic. Its behavior to other things is capable
of description in terms of what is determinately there. Under
given conditions, it just reacts or does not react. Its reactions
merely enstate a new set of conditions, in which reactions con-
tinue without regard to the nature of their outcome. It makes
no difference, so to say, to a stone what are the results of its
interactions with other things. It enjoys the advantage that it
makes no difference how it reacts, even if the effect is its own
pulverization. It requires no argument to show that the case
is different with a living organism. To live signifies that a
connected continuity of acts is effected in which preceding ones
prepare the conditions under which later ones occur. There is
a chain of cause and effects, of course, in what happens with
inanimate things. But for living creatures, the chain has a
particular cumulative continuity, or else death ensues.

As organisms become more complex in structure and thus
related to a more complex environment, the importance of
a particular act in establishing conditions favorable to subse-
quent acts that sustain the continuity of the life process, be-
comes at once more difficult and more imperative. A juncture
may be so critical that the right or wrong present move signifies
life or death. Conditions of the environment become more
ambivalent: it is more uncertain what sort of action they call
for in the interests of living. Behavior is thus compelled to

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THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

become more hesitant and wary, more expectant and prepara-
tory. In the degree that responses take place to the doubtful
as the doubtful, they acquire mental quality. If they are such
as to have a directed tendency to change the precarious and
problematic into the secure and resolved, they are intellectual
as well as mental. Acts are then relatively more instrumental
and less consummatory or final j even the latter are haunted
by a sense of what may issue from them.

This conception of the mental brings to unity various modes
of response j emotional, volitional and intellectual. It is usual
to say that there is no fundamental difference among these
activities that they are all different phases or aspects of a
common action of mind. But I know of but one way of making
this assertion good: that in which they are seen to be distinctive
modes of response to the uncertain. The emotional aspect of
responsive behavior is its immediate quality. When we are con-
fronted with the precarious, an ebb and flow of emotion marks
a disturbance of the even tenor of existence. Emotions are
conditioned by the indeterminateness of present situations
with respect to their issue. Fear and hope, joy and sorrow,
aversion and desire, as perturbations, are qualities of a divided
response. They involve concern, solicitude, for what the present
situation may become. "Care" signifies two quite different
things: fret, worry and anxiety, and cherishing attention to that
in whose potentialities we are interested. These two meanings
represent different poles of reactive behavior to a present hav-
ing a future which is ambiguous. Elation and depression, more-
over, manifest themselves only under conditions wherein not
everything from start to finish is completely determined and
certain. They may occur at a final moment of triumph or
defeat, but this moment is one of victory or frustration in
connection with a previous course of affairs whose issue was in
suspense. Love for a Being so perfect and complete that our

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

regard for it can make no difference to it is not so much affec-
tion as (a fact which the scholastics saw) it is concern for the
destiny of our own souls. Hate that is sheer antagonism
without any element of uncertainty is not an emotion, but is
an energy devoted to ruthless destruction. Aversion is a state
of affectivity only in connection with an obstruction offered
by the disliked object or person to an end made uncertain
by it.

The volitional phase of mental life is notoriously connected
with the emotional. The only difference is that the latter, is
the immediate, the cross-sectional, aspect of response to the
uncertain and precarious, while the volitional phase is the
tendency of the reaction to modify indeterminate, ambiguous
conditions in the direction of a preferred and favored outcome j
to actualize one of its possibilities rather than another. Emotion
is a hindrance or an aid to resolute will according as it is over-
whelming in its immediacy or as it marks a gathering together
of energy to deal with the situation whose issue is in doubt.
Desire, purpose, planning, choice, have no meaning save in
conditions where something is at stake, and where action in
one direction rather than another may eventuate in bringing
into existence a new situation which fulfills a need.

The intellectual phase of mental action is identical with
an indirect mode of response, one whose purpose is to locate
the nature of the trouble and form an idea of how it may be
dealt with so that operations may be directed in view of an
intended solution. Take any incident of experience you choose,
seeing a color, reading a book, listening to conversation, ma-
nipulating apparatus, studying a lesson, and it has or has not
intellectual, cognitive, quality according as there is deliberate
endeavor to deal with the indeterminate so as to dispose of it,
to settle it. Anything that may be called knowledge, or a known
object, marks a question answered, a difficulty disposed of, a

22$

THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

confusion cleared up, an inconsistency reduced to coherence,
a perplexity mastered. Without reference to this mediating
element, what is called knowledge is but direct and unswerving
action or else a possessive enjoyment. Similarly, thinking is
the actual transition from the problematic to the secure, as
far as that is intentionally guided. There is no separate "mind"
gifted in and of itself with a faculty of thought j such a con-
ception of thought ends in postulating the mystery of a power
outside of nature and yet able to intervene within it. Thinking
is objectively discoverable as that mode of serial responsive
behavior to a problematic situation in which transition to the
relatively settled and clear is effected.

The concrete pathologies of belief, its failures and perver-
sions, whether of defect or excess, spring from failure to ob-
serve and adhere to the principle that knowledge is the com-
pleted resolution of the inherently indeterminate or doubtful.
The commonest fallacy is to suppose that since the state of
doubt is accompanied by a feeling of uncertainty, knowledge
arises when this feeling gives way to one of assurance. Think-
ing then ceases to be an effort to effect change in the objective
situation and is replaced by various devices which generate a
change in feeling or "consciousness." Tendency to premature
judgment, jumping at conclusions, excessive love of simplicity,
making over of evidence to suit desire, taking the familiar for
the clear, etc., all spring from confusing the feeling of certi-
tude with a certified situation. Thought hastens toward the
settled and is only too likely to force the pace. The natural
man dislikes the dis-ease which accompanies the doubtful and
is ready to take almost any means to end it. Uncertainty is
got rid of by fair means or foul. Long exposure to danger
breeds an overpowering love of security. Love for security,
translated into a desire not to be disturbed and unsettled, leads
to dogmatism, to acceptance of beliefs upon authority, to in-

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

tolerance and fanaticism on one side and to irresponsible de-
pendence and sloth on the other.

Here is where ordinary thinking and thinking that is scrupu-
lous diverge from each other. The natural man is impatient
with doubt and suspense: he impatiently hurries to be shut
of it. A disciplined mind takes delight in the problematic, and
cherishes it until a way out is found that approves itself upon
examination. The questionable becomes an active questioning,
a search j desire for the emotion of certitude gives place to
quest for the objects by which the obscure and unsettled may
be developed into the stable and clear. The scientific attitude
may almost be defined as that which is capable of enjoying
the doubtful j scientific method is, in one aspect, a technique
for making a productive use of doubt by converting it into
operations of definite inquiry. No one gets far intellectually
who does not "love to think," and no one loves to think who
does not have an interest in problems as such. Being on the
alert for problems signifies that mere organic curiosity, the
restless disposition to meddle and reach out, has become a truly
intellectual curiosity, one that protects a person from hurrying
to a conclusion and that induces him to undertake active search
for new facts and ideas. Skepticism that is not such a search
is as much a personal emotional indulgence as is dogmatism.
Attainment of the relatively secure and settled takes place,
however, only with respect to specified problematic situations}
quest for certainty that is universal, applying to everything, is
a compensatory perversion. One question is disposed of j an-
other offers itself and thought is kept alive.

When we compare the theory of mind and its organs which
develops from analysis of what takes place when precarious
situations are translated into statement and resolution of prob-
lems, with other theories, the outstanding difference is that
the first type of theory introduces no elements save such as are

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THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

public, observable, and verifiable. In general, when there is
discourse about the mental organs and processes of knowing
we are told about sensations, mental images, consciousness and
its various states, as if these were capable of identification in
and of themselves. These mental organs having had meaning
assigned to them in isolation from the operations of resolving
a problematic situation, are then used to give an account of
the actual operations of knowing. The more evident and ob-
servable is thus "explained" in terms of the obscure, the ob-
scurity being hidden from view because of habits that have the
weight of tradition behind them.

We do not need to repeat the results of the previous dis-
cussion. They are all connected with the theory that inquiry
is a set of operations in which problematic situations are
disposed of or settled. Theories which have been criticized
all rest upon a different supposition} namely, that the proper-
ties of the states and acts of mind involved in knowing are
capable of isolated determination of description apart from
overt acts that resolve indeterminate and ambiguous situations.
The fundamental advantage of framing our account of the
organs and processes of knowing on the pattern of what occurs
in experimental inquiry is that nothing is introduced save what
is objective and is accessible to examination and report. If it is
objected that such an examination itself involves mind and its
organs, the rejoinder is that the theory we have advanced is
self-applying. Its only "assumption" is that something is done,
done in the ordinary external sense of that word, and that
this doing has consequences. We define mind and its organs
in terms of this doing and its results, just as we define or frame
ideas of stars, acids, and digestive tissues in terms of their
behavior. If it be urged that we do not know whether the re-
sults of the directed operations are really knowledge or not,
the answer is the objection assumes that we have some kind

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

of advance intimation of what sort of a thing knowledge must
be, and hence can use this conception as a standard for judging
particular conclusions. The theory in question makes no such
assumption. It asserts that by some operations conclusions
emerge in which objects once uncertain and confused are ren-
dered clear and stable. Alter names as much as you please j re-
fuse to call one set of consequences knowledge and another
error, or reverse the appellations, and these consequences re-
main just what they are. They present the difference between
resolved and clarified situations and disordered and obscure
ones. A rose by another name would smell as sweet j the gist of
the theory advanced is to point to operations performed and to
the consequences which issue from them.

Another point of difference is that traditional theories of
mind and its organs of knowledge isolate them from continuity
with the natural world. They are, in the literal sense of the
word, super-natural or extra-natural. The problem of mind
and body, of how it happens that bodily structures are involved
in observing and thinking, is then unavoidable. When little
was known about organic structures, one reason for looking
down upon perception was that its connection with bodily or-
gans, the eye and ear and hand, could not escape notice, while
thought could be regarded as a purely spiritual act. But now
we are aware that the exercise of thought bears the same rela-
tion to the brain that perception bears to sense organs, and
that there is no separation, structural or functional, between
the eye and ear and the central organs. Consequently it is
impossible to think of sense as quasi-physical and thought as
purely mental, as if the mental meant just the non-material.
Yet we retain theories about the mental formed before we had
this knowledge. Consequently, since those theories isolate
knowing from doing, the dependence of knowing upon bodily
organs becomes a mystery a "problem."

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THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

But if knowing is one mode of doing, then it, as well
as other modes of doing, properly involves bodily instru-
ments. The metaphysical problem of the relation of mind
and body is converted into a question, to be solved by observa-
tion of facts, of a differentiation of actions into those on a
strictly physiological level, and those which, because of di-
rected quality and distinctive consequences, are mental.

While traditional theories regard mind as an intruder from
without into the natural development, or evolution, of organic
structures, or else in the interest of natural continuity feel
compelled to deny that mental behavior has any differential
features, the theory that organic responses have mental quality
in the degree in which they deal with the uncertain recognizes
both continuity and difference. It can, in principle if not as yet
in detail, give a genetic account of the development of mental
and intellectual processes. There is neither a sudden jump from
the merely organic to the intellectual, nor is there complete
assimilation of the latter to primitive modes of the former.

On the objective side, the great difference between the
conception proposed and that of traditional theory consists in
recognition of the objective character of indeterminateness:
it is a real property of some natural existences. Greek thought
at least acknowledged the presence of contingency in natural
existence, although it used this property of uncertainty to
assign to natural existence a lower status than that which be-
longs to necessary Being. Modern thought, largely under the
influence of a Newtonian philosophy of nature, tended to
treat all existence as wholly determinate. The inherently in-
complete was eliminated from nature along with qualities and
ends. In consequence, the mental was sharply marked off from
the physically natural j for the mental was obviously charac-
terized by doubt and uncertainty. Mind was placed outside of
nature} its relation to nature in knowing the latter became a

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

dark mystery; the uncertain and indeterminate were said to
be merely subjective. The contrast between the doubtful and
the determinate became one of the chief marks by which ob-
jective and subjective were demarcated from each other and
placed in opposition.

According to this doctrine, we are doubtful, puzzled, con-
fused, undecided j objects are complete, assured, fixed. It is
not easy to reconcile this notion with the fact that in order
to relieve our doubt, to "make up" our minds, we have to
modify in some way, in imaginative or overt experimentation,
the situation in which uncertainty is experienced. Moreover,
the procedure of science is conclusive. If doubt and inde-
terminateness were wholly within the mind whatever that
may signify purely mental processes ought to get rid of them.
But experimental procedure signifies that actual alteration of
an external situation is necessary to effect the conversion. A
situation undergoes, through operations directed by thought,
transition from problematic to settled, from internal discon-
tinuity to coherency and organization.

If we define "mental" through exclusion of overt acts that
terminate in a changed environment, nothing merely mental
can actually resolve doubt or clarify confusion. At most it can
produce only a feeling of certainty something best obtained
by withdrawing from the real world and cultivating fantasies.
The idea that doubt and assurance are merely subjective is con-
tradicted by the coincidence of the progress of physical inquiry
with invention and use of physical instruments. In principle,
the correspondence of what we do when a situation is practically
unsatisfactory with what happens in the case of intellectual
doubt is complete. If a man finds himself in a situation which
is practically annoying and troublesome, he has just two courses
open to him. He can make a change in himself either by run-
ning away from trouble or by steeling himself to Stoic endur-

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THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

ance; or he can set to work to do something so as to change the
conditions of which unsatisfactoriness is a quality. When the
latter course is impossible, nothing remains but the former.

Some change of personal attitude is the part of wisdom in
any case, for there are few if any cases of trouble into which
a personal factor of desire or aversion does not enter as a
productive cause. But the idea that this causal factor can be
changed by purely direct means, by an exercise of "will" or
"thought" is illusory. A change of desire and purpose can it-
self be effected only indirectly, by a change in one's actual
relation to environment. This change implies definite acts. The
technological appliances and agencies that man has constructed
to make these acts effective correspond to the development
of instruments of scientific inquiry by which outer conditions
are intentionally varied.

The relegation of the problematic to the "subjective" is
a product of the habit of isolating man and experience from
nature. Curiously enough, modern science has joined with
traditional theology in perpetuating this isolation. If the physi-
cal terms by which natural science deals with the world are
supposed to constitute that world, it follows as a matter of
course that qualities we experience and which are the distinctive
things in human life, fall outside of nature. Since some of these
qualities are the traits that give life purpose and value, it is not
surprising that many thinkers are dissatisfied with thinking of
them as merely subjective} nor that they have found in tra-
ditional religious beliefs and in some elements of the classic
philosophic tradition means by which these traits can be used
to substantiate the being of a reality higher than nature, one
qualified by the purpose and value that are extruded from
natural existence. Modern idealism cannot be understood apart
from the conditions that have generated it. Fundamentally,
these conditions are the fusion of the positive results of the

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older metaphysics with the negative conclusions of modern
science: negative, that is to say, when, because of the per-
sistence of earlier notions about mind and the office of knowl-
edge, science is taken to disclose an antecedent natural world.

The organism is a part of the natural world} its interactions
with it are genuine additive phenomena. When, with the de-
velopment of symbols, also a natural occurrence, these inter-
actions are directed towards anticipated consequences, they gain
the quality of intelligence, and knowledge accrues. Problematic
situations when they are resolved then gain the meaning of all
the relations which the operations of thought have defined.
Things that were casually effective in producing experienced
results became means to consequences} these consequences in-
corporate in themselves all the meanings found in the causes
which intentionally produce them. The supposed grounds for
opposing human experience to the reality of nature disappear.
Situations have problematic and resolved characters in and
through the actual interactions of the organism and the en-
vironment. To refuse to treat these qualities as characteristic
of nature itself is due to an arbitrary refusal to ascribe to some
modes of interaction the existential character which is assigned
as a matter of course to others.

We have seen that situations are precarious and perilous be-
cause the persistence of life-activity depends upon the influence
which present acts have upon future acts. The continuity of a
life-process is secured only as acts performed render the en-
vironment favorable to subsequent organic acts. The formal
generalized statement of this fact is as follows: The occurrence
of problematic and unsettled situations is due to the charac-
teristic union of the discrete or individual and the continuous
or relational. All perceived objects are individualized. They
are, as such, wholes complete in themselves. Everything di-
rectly experienced is qualitatively unique} it has its own focus

234

1

THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

about which subject-matter is arranged, and this focus never
exactly recurs. While every such situation shades off in-
definitely, or is not sharply marked off from others, yet the
pattern of arrangement of content is never exactly twice
alike.

If the interactions involved in having such an individualized
situation in experience were wholly final or consummatory,
there would be no such thing as a situation which is problem-
atic. In being individual and complete in itself, just what it
is and nothing else, it would be discrete in the sense in which
discreteness signifies complete isolation. Obscurity, for example,
would be a final quality, like any other quality and as good
as any other just as the dusk of twilight is enjoyed instead
of being troublesome until we need to see something the dusk
interferes with seeing. Every situation has vagueness attending
it, as it shades off from a sharper focus into what is indefinite j
for vagueness is added quality and not something objectionable
except as it obstructs gaining an eventual object.

There are situations in which self-enclosed, discrete, indi-
vidualized characters dominate. They constitute the subject-
matter of esthetic experience} and every experience is esthetic
in as far as it is final or arouses no search for some other ex-
perience. When this complete quality is conspicuous the experi-
ence is denominated esthetic. The fine arts have as their purpose
the construction of objects of just such experiences; and under
some conditions the completeness of the object enjoyed gives
the experience a quality so intense that it is justly termed re-
ligious. Peace and harmony suffuse the entire universe gathered
up into the situation having a particular focus and pattern.
These qualities mark any experience in as far as its final charac-
ter dominates} in so far a mystic experience is simply an ac-
centuated intensification of a quality of experience repeatedly
had in the rhythm of experiences.

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

Interactions, however, are not isolated. No experienced
situation can retain indefinitely its character of finality, for the
interrelations that constitute it are, because they are interactions,
themselves changing. They produce a change in what is ex-
perienced. The effort to maintain directly a consummatory ex-
perienced or to repeat it exactly is the source of unreal senti-
mentality and of insincerity. In the continuous ongoing of life,
objects part with something of their final character and become
conditions of subsequent experiences. There is regulation of the
change in the degree in which a causal character is rendered
preparatory and instrumental.

In other words, all experienced objects have a double status.
They are individualized, consummatory, whether in the way
of enjoyment or of suffering. They are also involved in a
continuity of interactions and changes, and hence are causes
and potential means of later experiences. Because of this dual
capacity, they become problematic. Immediately and directly
they are just what they are} but as transitions to and possi-
bilities of later experiences they are uncertain. There is a
divided response} part of the organic activity is directed to
them for what they immediately are, and part to them as
transitive means of other experienced objects. We react to them
both as finalities and in preparatory ways, and the two reactions
do not harmonize.

This two-fold character of experienced objects is the source
of their problematic character. Each of us can recall many
occasions when he has been perplexed by disagreement be-
tween things directly present and their potential value as
signs and means } when he has been torn between absorption
in what is now enjoyed and the need of altering it so as to
prepare for something likely to come. If we state the point
in a formal way, it is signified that there is an incompatibility
between the traits of an object in its direct individual and

236

THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

unique nature and those traits that belong to it in its relations
or continuities. This incompatibility can be removed only by
actions which temporally reconstruct what is given and con-
stitute a new object having both individuality and the internal
coherence of continuity in a series.

Previous discussion has been a statement of the chief factors
that operate in bringing about this reconstruction of resolving
a problematic situation: Acts of analytic reduction of the gross
total situation to determine data qualities that locate the na-
ture of the problem; formation of ideas or hypotheses to direct
further operations that reveal new material; deductions and
calculations that organize the new and old subject-matter to-
gether; operations that finally determine the existence of a new
integrated situation with added meaning, and in so doing test
or prove the ideas that have been employed.

Without retraversing that discussion, I wish to add a few
words on one point involved in it. Nothing is more familiar
than the standardized objects of reference designated by com-
mon nouns. Their distinction from proper names shows that
they are not singular or individual, not existing things. Yet
"the table" is both more familiar and seemingly more sub-
stantial than this table, the individual. "This" undergoes
change all the time. It is interacting with other things and with
me, who are not exactly the same person as when I last wrote
upon it. "This" is an indefinitely multiple and varied series of
"thises."

But save in extreme cases, these changes are indifferent,
negligible, from the standpoint of means for consequences. The
table is precisely the constancy among the serial "thises" of
whatever serves as an instrument for a single end. Knowledge
is concerned wholly with this constant, this standardized and
averaged set of properties and relations: just as esthetic per-
ception is occupied with "this" in its individuality, irrespective

237

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

of value in use. In the degree in which reactions are inchoate
and unformed, "this" tends to be the buzzing, blooming con-
fusion of which James wrote. As habits form, action is stereo-
typed into a fairly constant series of acts having a common end
in view; the table serves a single use, in spite of individual
variations. A group of properties is set aside, corresponding
to the abiding end and single mode of use which form the
object, in distinction from "this" of unique experiences. The
object is an abstraction, but unless it is hypostatized it is not a
vicious abstraction. It designates selected relations of things
which, with respect to their mode of operation, are constant
within the limits practically important. Moreover, the ab-
stracted object has a consequence In the individualized ex-
periences, one that is immediate and not merely instrumental
to them. It marks an ordering and organizing of responses
in a single focused way in virtue of which the original blur is
definitized and rendered significant. Without habits dealing
with recurrent and constant uses of things for abiding purposes,
immediate esthetic perception would have neither rich nor clear
meanings immanent within it.

The scientific or physical object marks an extension of the
same sort of operation. The table, as not a table but as a swarm
of molecules in motions of specified velocities and accelera-
tions, corresponds to a liberated generalization of the pur-
poses which the object may serve. "Table" signifies a definite
but restricted set of uses; stated in the physical terms of science
it is thought of in a wider environment and free from any
specified set of uses; out of relation to any particular individ-
ualized experience. The abstraction is as legitimate as is that
which gives rise to the idea of the table, for it consists of
standardized relations or interactions. It is even more useful or
more widely instrumental. For it has connection with an in-
definite variety of unspecified but possible consummatory in-

238

THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

dividual observations and enjoyments. It waits like a servant,
idle for a time, but ready to be called upon as special occasion
arises. When this standardized constant, the result of series
of operations and expressing an indefinite multitude of pos-
sible relations among concrete things, is treated as the reality of
nature, an instrument made for a purpose is hypostatized into
a substance complete and self-sufficient in isolation. Then the
fullness of qualities present in individual situations have to be
treated as subjective impressions mysteriously produced in
mind by the real object or else as products of a mysterious cre-
ative faculty of consciousness.

The bearing of the conclusion upon the qualitative values
of experienced objects is evident. Interactions of things with
the organism eventuate in objects perceived to be colored and
sonorous. They also result in qualities that make the object
hateful or delightful. All these qualities, taken as directly
perceived or enjoyed, are terminal effects of natural interac-
tions. They are individualized culminations that give static
quality to a network of changes. Thus " tertiary " qualities (as
they have been happily termed by Mr. Santayana), those which,
in psychological analysis, we call affectional and emotional, are
as much products of the doings of nature as are color, sound,
pressure, perceived size and distance. But their very consum-
matory quality stands in the way of using the things they
qualify as signs of other things. Intellectually they are even
more in the way than are "secondary" qualities. With respect
to preparatory acts they are useless j when they are treated
as signs and means they work injury to thought and discov-
ery. When not experienced, they are projected in thought as
ends to be reached and in that dependence upon thought they
are felt to be peculiarly mental. But only if the object, the
physical object, instrumental in character, is supposed to de-
fine "the real" in an exhaustive way, do they cease to be for

239

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

the philosopher what they are for the common man: real
qualities of natural objects. This view forms the only com-
plete and unadulterated realism.

The problem which is supposed to exist between two
tables, one that of direct perception and use and the other
that of physics (to take the favorite illustration of recent dis-
cussion) is thus illusory. The perceived and used table is the
only table, for it alone has both individuality of form with-
out which nothing can exist or be perceived, and also includes
within itself a continuum of relations or interactions brought
to a focus. We may perhaps employ more instructively an il-
lustration derived from the supposed contrast between an
object experienced in perception as it is rendered by a poet
and the same object described by a physicist. There is the
instance of a body of water where the movement of the wind
over its surface is reflected in sunlight. As an object of science,
it is reported as follows: "Etherial vibrations of various wave
lengths, reflected at different angles from the disturbed inter-
face between air and water, reached our eyes and by photo-
electric action caused appropriate stimuli to travel along optic
nerves to a brain center." Such a statement, however, includes
ordinary objects of individual perceptions j water, air, brain
and nerves. Consequently, it must be reduced still further j
when so reduced it consists of mathematical functions between
certain physical constants having no counterpart in ordinary
perception.*

It is worth while at this point to recur to the metric char-
acter of the physical object. Defining metric traits are reached

*The illustration is borrowed from Eddington, The Nature of the Physical
World; see pp. 316-319. It is indicative of the hold which the older tradition of
knowledge as the exclusive revelation of reality has obtained, that Eddington
finds no way to combine this account with the poetic account, save to suppose
that while the scientific statement describes reality as it is "in itself," the
creative activity of mind adds to this skeleton the qualities characterizing an
object in direct experience.

24O

THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

by a series of operations of which they express the statistically
constant outcome j they are not the result of a single act. Hence
the physical object cannot be taken to be a single or individual
thing in existence. Metric definitions are also, in large measure,
reached by indirect measurements, by calculation. In other
words, the conception of the physical object is, in considerable
degree, the outcome of complex operations of comparison and
translation. In consequence, while the physical object is not any
one of the things compared, it enables things qualitatively un-
like and individual to be treated as if they were members of a
comprehensive, homogeneous, or non-qualitative system. The
possibility of control of the occurrence of individualized ob-
jects is thereby increased. At the same time, the latter gain
added meaning, for the import of the scheme of continuity of
relationships with other things is incorporated within them.
The procedure of physics itself, not any metaphysical or epis-
temological theory, discloses that physical objects cannot be
individual existential objects. In consequence, it is absurd to put
them in opposition to the qualitatively individual objects of
concrete experience.

The vogue of the philosophy that identifies the object of
knowledge as such with the reality of the subject-matter of
experience makes it advisable to carry the discussion further.
Physical science submits the things of ordinary experience to
specifiable operations. The result are objects of thought stated
in numbers, where the numbers in question permit inclusion
within complex systems of equations and other mathematical
functions. In the physical object everything is ignored but the
relations expressed by these numbers. It is safe to assert that
no physicist while at work ever thought of denying the full
reality of the things of ordinary, coarse experience. He pays
no attention to their qualities except as they are signs of opera-
tions to be performed and of inference to relations to be

241

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

drawn. But in these capacities he has to admit their full reality
on pain of having, logically, to deny reality to the conclusions
of his operative inferences. He takes the instruments he em-
ploys, including his own sensory-motor organs and measuring
instruments, to be real in the ordinary sense of the word. If
he denied the reality of these things as they are had in ordinary
non-cognitive perceptual experience, the conclusions reached by
them would be equally discredited. Moreover, the numbers
which define his metric object are themselves results of noting
interactions or connections among perceived things. It would
be the height of absurdity to assert the reality of these rela-
tions while denying the reality of the things between which
they hold. If the latter are "subjective" what becomes of the
former? Finally, observation is resorted to for verification. It
is a strange world in which the conception of the real has to
be corroborated by reference to that the reality of which is
made dubious by the conception. To common sense these com-
ments may seem wholly superfluous. But since common sense
may also hold the doctrine from which flow the conclusions to
which the critical comments are apposite, common sense should
first ask whether it holds that knowledge is a disclosure of the
antecedently real? If it entertains this belief, then the dis-
missal by science of the experienced object to a limbo of un-
reality, or subjectivity or the phenomenal whatever terms be
used results logically from his own position.

Our discussion involves a summary as well as some repeti-
tion of points previously made. Its significance lies in the lib-
eration which comes when knowing, in all its phases, condi-
tions and organs, is understood after the pattern provided by
experimental inquiry, instead of upon the groundwork of ideas
framed before such knowing had a systematic career opened
to it. For according to the pattern set by the practice of know-
ing, knowledge is the fruit of the undertakings that transform

242

THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

a problematic situation into a resolved one. Its procedure is
public, a part and partner of the Nature in all which inter-
actions exist. But experienced situations come about in two
ways and are of two distinct types. Some take place with only
a minimum of regulation, with little foresight, preparation and
intent. Others occur because, in part, of the prior occurrence
of intelligent action. Both kinds are had; they are undergone,
enjoyed or suffered. The first are not known } they are not
understood} they are dispensations of fortune or providence.
The second have, as they are experienced, meanings that pre-
sent the funded outcome of operations that substitute definite
continuity for experienced discontinuity and for the fragmen-
tary quality due to isolation. Dream, insanity and fantasy are
natural products, as "real" as anything else in the world. The
acts of intentional regulation which constitute thinking are also
natural developments, and so are the experienced things in
which they eventuate. But the latter are resolutions of the
problems set by objects experienced without intent and pur-
pose} hence they have a security and fullness of meaning
the first lack. Nothing happens, as Aristotle and the scholastics
said, without an end without a terminal effectuation. Every
experienced object is, in some sense, such a closing and con-
summatory closing episode: alike the doubtful and secure, the
trivial and significant, the true and mistaken, the confused and
ordered. Only when the ends are closing termini of intelligent
operations of thinking are they ends in the honorific sense. We
always experience individual objects, but only the individual
things which are fruits of intelligent action have in them in-
trinsic order and fullness of qualities.

The conditions and processes of nature generate uncer-
tainty and its risks as truly as nature affords security and
means of insurance against perils. Nature is characterized by
a constant mixture of the precarious and the stable. This mix-

243

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

ture gives poignancy to existence. If existence were either com-
pletely necessary or completely contingent, there would be
neither comedy nor tragedy in life, nor need of the will to
live. The significance of morals and politics, of the arts both
technical and fine, of religion and of science itself as inquiry
and discovery, all have their source and meaning in the union
in Nature of the settled and the unsettled, the stable and the
hazardous. Apart from this union, there are no such things as
"ends," either as consummations or as those ends-in-view we
call purposes. There is only a block universe, either something
ended and admitting of no change, or else a predestined march
of events. There is no such thing as fulfillment where there is
no risk of failure, and no defeat where there is no promise of
possible achievement.

Any philosophy that in its quest for certainty ignores the
reality of the uncertain in the ongoing processes of nature
denies the conditions out of which it arises. The attempt to
include all that is doubtful within the fixed grasp of that
which is theoretically certain is committed to insincerity and
evasion, and in consequence will have the stigmata of internal
contradiction. Every such philosophy is marked at some point
by a division of its subject-matter into the truly real and the
merely apparent, a subject and an object, a physical and a
mental, an ideal and an actual, that have nothing to do with
one another, save in some mode which is so mysterious as to
create an insoluble problem.

Action is the means by which a problematic situation is re-
solved. Such is the net outcome of the method of science.
There is nothing extraordinary about this conclusion. Interac-
tion is a universal trait of natural existence. "Action" is the
name given to one mode of this interaction, namely, that
named from the standpoint of an organism. When interaction
has for its consequence the settling of future conditions under

244

THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

which a life-process goes on, it is an "act." If it be admitted
that knowing is something which occurs within nature, then it
follows as a truism that knowing is an existential overt act.
Only if the one who engages in knowing be outside of nature
and behold it from some external locus can it be denied that
knowing is an act which* modifies what previously existed, and
that its worth consists in the consequences of the modifica-
tion. The spectator theory of knowing may, humanly speaking,
have been inevitable when thought was viewed as an exercise
of a "reason" independent of the body, which by means of
purely logical operations attained truth. It is an anachronism
now that we have the model of experimental procedure before
us and are aware of the role of organic acts in all mental
processes.

Our discussion has for the most part turned upon an anal-
ysis of knowledge. The theme, however, is the relation of
knowledge and action} the final import of the conclusions as
to knowledge resides in the changed idea it enforces as to
action. The distinction once made between theory and practice
has meaning as a distinction between two kinds of action: blind
and intelligent. Intelligence is a quality of some acts, those
which are directed} and directed action is an achievement not
an original endowment. The history of human progress is the
story of the transformation of acts which, like the interactions
of inanimate things, take place unknowingly to actions qualified
by understanding of what they are about} from actions con-
trolled by external conditions to actions having guidance
through their intent: their insight into their own conse-
quences. Instruction, information, knowledge, is the only way
in which this property of intelligence comes to qualify acts
originally blind.

This conclusion is decisive for the significance of purpose
and mechanism in nature. The doctrine that knowledge is

245

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

ideally or in its office a disclosure of antecedent reality re-
sulted, under the impact of the results of natural science, in
relegating purpose to the purely subjective, to states of con-
sciousness. An unsolved problem then developed out of the
question as to how purposes could be efficacious in the world.
Now intelligent action is purposive action; if it is a natural oc-
currence, coming into being under complex but specifiable con-
ditions of organic and social interaction, then purpose like in-
telligence is within nature j it is a "category" having objective
standing and validity. It has this status in a direct way through
the place and operation of human art within the natural scene j
for distinctively human conduct can be interpreted and under-
stood only in terms of purpose. Purpose is the dominant cate-
gory of anything truly denominated history, whether in its
enacting or in the writing of it, since action which is distinctively
human is marked by intent.

Indirectly, purpose is a legitimate and necessary idea in
describing Nature itself in the large. For man is continuous
with nature. As far as natural events culminate in the intelli-
gent arts of mankind, nature itself has a history, a movement
toward consequences. When for convenience of study, nature
is broken up into disconnected bits the parts of which are taken
to have a relation to one another in isolation from other parts,
the concept of purpose has no application. It is excluded by the
very method of intellectual approach. Science is full of ab-
stractions of this sort. For example, water is a combination
of hydrogen and oxygen in definite proportions. This is a state-
ment about "water" in general, not about the occurrence of
any particular portion which takes place under conditions in
which more than hydrogen and oxygen exist. Any individ-
ualized water is a phase of an indefinitely varied and extensive
course of things. Generically, however, "water" is treated in
relation to its defining constituents as if it were a complete uni-

246

THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

verse in itself. As a statement of a relation that is stable amid
a multitude of varying changes, each having its own individ-
ualized history, it is an instrument of control. When it is
treated as if it provided a model for framing a general theory
of nature, the result converts an instrument of control into
a view of the world in which there is neither history nor pur-
pose.

Generalized facts, when they are taken to be individual
events complete in themselves, lead to a picture of the uni-
verse in which occurrences are exactly like one another. There
is repetition but no development} mechanical production but
no cumulative movement toward an integrated consequence.
We take out of our logical package what we have put into it,
and then convert what we draw out to be a literal descrip-
tion of the actual world. Things lose their individuality and
are "instances" of a general law. When, however, events are
viewed in their connections, as it is surely the province of
philosophy to view them, nature is seen to be marked by his-
tories, some of which terminate in the existence of human
beings and finally in their intelligent activities. This issue, as
the consequence of a cumulative integration of complex inter-
actions, is such as to give anterior processes a purposive mean-
ing. Everything depends whether we take short-sections of the
course of nature in isolation, or whether we take the course of
events over a span of time sufficiently long to disclose the
integration of a multitude of processes toward a single out-
come.*

A machine is a striking instance of mechanism. It is an
equally striking instance of something to be understood in
terms of purpose, use or function. Nature has mechanism. This
mechanism forms the content of the objects of physical science

* Purposive Universe, New York, 1926, by Edmund Noble, contains by far
the best statement known to me of considerations of which a brief summary
is given in this paragraph.

247

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

for it fulfills the instrumental office to be performed by
knowledge. If the interactions and connections involved in
natural occurrences were not sufficiently like one another, suf-
ficiently constant and uniform, so that inference and predic-
tion from one to another were possible, control and purpose
would be non-existent. Since constant relations among changes
are the subject-matter of scientific thought, that subject-mat-
ter is the mechanism of events. The net effect of modern in-
quiry makes it clear that these constancies, whether the larger
ones termed laws or the lesser ones termed facts, are statistical
in nature. They are the products of averaging large numbers
of observed frequencies by means of a series of operations.
They are not descriptions of the exact structure and behavior
of any individual thing, any more than the actuarial "law"
of the frequency of deaths of persons having a certain age
is an account of the life of one of the persons included in
the calculation. Nature has a mechanism sufficiently constant
to permit of calculation, inference and foresight. But only a
philosophy which hypostatizes isolated results and results ob-
tained for a purpose, only a substantiation of the function
of being a tool, concludes that nature is a mechanism and only
a mechanism.

It has long been recognized that some physical laws are
statistical, instead of being reports of behavior of individuals
as such. Heisenberg's principle, together with the discovery
that mass varies with velocity, mark the generalized conclu-
sion that all physical laws are of this character. They are, as
we have noted, predictions of the probability of an observable
event. They mark the culmination of a qualified prediction of
Maxwell's so remarkable as to be worth quoting in full. "The
theory of atoms and void leads us to attach more importance
to the doctrines of integral numbers and definite proportions}
but, in applying dynamic principles to the motion of immense

248

THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

numbers of atoms, the limitation of our faculties forces us to
abandon the attempt to express the exact history of each atom
and to be content with estimating the average condition of a
group of atoms large enough to be visible. This method of
dealing with groups of atoms, which I might call the statistical
method, and which in the present state of our knowledge, is
the only available method of studying the properties of real
bodies, involves an abandonment of strict dynamical principles,
and an adoption of the mathematical methods belonging to the
theory of probability. It is probable that important results
will be obtained by the application of this method, which is,
as yet, little known and is not familiar to our minds. If the
actual history of science had been different, and if the scientific
doctrines most familiar to us had been those which must be
expressed in this way, it is probable that we might have con-
sidered the existence of a certain kind of contingency as a self-
evident truth and treated the doctrine of philosophical neces-
sity as a mere sophism," * That which Maxwell felt that he
must look upon as a trait due to the "limitation of our facul-
ties" turns out to be a trait of natural events themselves. No
mechanically exact science of an individual is possible. An
individual is a history unique in character. But constituents
of an individual are known when they are regarded not as
qualitative, but as statistical constants derived from a series of
operations.

This fact has an obvious bearing on freedom in action.
Contingency is a necessary although not, in mathematical
phrase, a sufficient condition of freedom. In a world which was
completely tight and exact in all its constituents, there would
be no room for freedom. Contingency while it gives room for
freedom does not fill that room. Freedom is an actuality when

J. C. Maxwell, Scientific Papers, Vol. II, p. 253. I am indebted to Dr.
Charles Hartshorne for this reference.

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

the recognition of relations, the stable element, is combined
with the uncertain element, in the knowledge which makes
foresight possible and secures intentional preparation for prob-
able consequences. We are free in the degree* in which we act
knowing what we are about. The identification of freedom with
"freedom of will" locates contingency in the wrong place.
Contingency of will would mean that uncertainty was uncer-
tainly dealt with j it would be a resort to chance for a decision.
The business of "will" is to be resolute; that is, to resolve,
under the guidance of thought, the indeterminateness of un-
certain situations. Choice wavers and is brought to a head
arbitrarily only when circumstances compel action and yet we
have no intelligent clew as to how to act.

The doctrine of "free-will" is a desperate attempt to es-
cape from the consequences of the doctrine of fixed and im-
mutable objective Being. With dissipation of that dogma, the
need for such a measure of desperation vanishes. Preferential
activities characterize every individual as individual or unique.
In themselves these are differential in a de facto sense. They
become true choices under the direction of insight. Knowledge,
instead of revealing a world in which preference is an illu-
sion and does not count or make a difference, puts in our
possession the instrumentality by means of which preference
may be an intelligent or intentional factor in constructing a
future by wary and prepared action. Knowledge of special con-
ditions and relations is instrumental to the action which is in
turn an instrument of production of situations having qualities
of added significance and order. To be capable of such action
is to be free.

Physical inquiry has been taken as typical of the nature of
knowing. The selection is justified because the operations of
physical knowledge are so perfected and its scheme of symbols
so well devised. But it would be misinterpreted if it were taken

250

THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

to mean that science is the only valid kind of knowledge} it is
just an intensified form of knowing in which are written large
the essential characters of any knowing. It is in addition the
most powerful tool we possess for developing other modes
of knowledge. But we know with respect to any subject-mat-
ter whatsoever in the degree in which we are able deliber-
ately to transform doubtful situations into resolved ones.
Physical knowledge has the advantage of its specialized char-
acter, its whole-hearted devotion to a single purpose. The atti-
tude involved in it, its method, has not as yet gone far beyond
its own precincts. Beliefs current in morals, politics and reli-
gion, are marked by dread of change and by the feeling that
order and regulative authority can be had only through refer-
ence to fixed standards accepted as finalities, because referring
to fixed antecedent realities. Outside of physical inquiry, we
shy from problems j we dislike uncovering serious difficulties
in their full depth and reach} we prefer to accept what is
and muddle along. Hence our social and moral "sciences" con-
sist largely in putting facts as they are into conceptual systems
framed at large. Our logic in social and humane subjects is
still largely that of definition and classification as until the
seventeenth century it was in natural science. For the most
part the lesson of experimental inquiry has still to be learned
in the things of chief concern.

We are, socially, in a condition of division and confusion
because our best authenticated knowledge is obtained by di-
rected practice, while this method is still limited to things aloof
from man or concerning him only in the technologies of in-
dustries. The rest of our practice in matters that come home
to us most closely and deeply is regulated not by intelligent
operations, but by tradition, self-interest and accidental cir-
cumstance. The most significant phase of physical science,
that which concerns its method, is unapplied in social practice,

251

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

while its technical results are utilized by those in positions of
privileged advantage to serve their own private or class ends.
Of the many consequences that result, the state of education
is perhaps the most significant. As the means of the general
institution of intelligent action, it holds the key to orderly
social reconstruction. But inculcation of fixed conclusions rather
than development of intelligence as a method of action still
dominates its processes. Devotion to training in technical and
mechanical skills on one hand and to laying in a store of ab-
stract information on the other is to one who has the power
to read the scene an almost perfect illustration of the signifi-
cance of the historic separation of knowledge and action, theory
and practice. As long as the isolation of knowledge and practice
holds sway, this division of aims and dissipation of energy, of
which the state of education is typical, will persist. The effec-
tive condition of the integration of all divided purposes and
conflicts of belief is the realization that intelligent action is
the sole ultimate resource of mankind in every field whatso-
ever.

It is not claimed, therefore, that there is no philosophical
problem of the relation of physical science to the things of
ordinary experience. It is asserted that the problem in the -form
in which it has chiefly occupied modern philosophy is an artifi-
cial one, due to the continued assumption of premises formed
in an earlier period of history and now having no relevancy to
the state of physical inquiry. Clearing the ground of this unreal
problem, however, only imposes upon philosophy the consid-
eration of a problem which is urgently practical, growing out of
the conditions of contemporary life. What revisions and sur-
renders of current beliefs about authoritative ends and values
are demanded by the method and conclusions of natural science?
What possibilities of controlled transformation of the content
of present belief and practice in human institutions and associa-

252

THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD

tions are indicated by the control of natural energies which
natural science has effected? These questions are as genuine
and imperative as the traditional problem is artificial and
futile.

253

CHAPTER X
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD

WE SAW AT the outset of our discussion that insecurity gener-
ates the quest for certainty. Consequences issue from every ex-
perience, and they are the source of our interest in what is
present. Absence of arts of regulation diverted the search for
security into irrelevant modes of practice, into rite and cult;
thought was devoted to discovery of omens rather than of
signs of what is to occur. Gradually there was differentiation
of two realms, one higher, consisting of the powers which de-
termine human destiny in all important affairs. With this
religion was concerned. The other consisted of the prosaic mat-
ters in which man relied upon his own skill and his matter-
of-fact insight. Philosophy inherited the idea of this divi-
sion. Meanwhile in Greece many of the arts had attained a
state of development which raised them above a merely routine
state; there were intimations of measure, order and regularity
in materials dealt with which give intimations of underlying
rationality. Because of the growth of mathematics, there arose
also the ideal of a purely rational knowledge, intrinsically
solid and worthy and the means by which the intimations of
rationality within changing phenomena could be comprehended
within science. For the intellectual class the stay and consola-
tion, the warrant of certainty, provided by religion was hence-
forth found in intellectual demonstration of the reality of the
objects of an ideal realm.

With the expansion of Christianity, ethico-religious traits
came to dominate the purely rational ones. The ultimate au-

254

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD

thoritative standards for regulation of the dispositions and
purposes of the human will were fused with those which satis-
fied the demands for necessary and universal truth. The au-
thority of ultimate Being was, moreover, represented on earth
by the Church j that which in its nature transcended intellect
was made known by a revelation of which the Church was the
interpreter and guardian. The system endured for centuries.
While it endured, it provided an integration of belief and
conduct for the western world. Unity of thought and practice
extended down to every detail of the management of lifej
efficacy of its operation did not depend upon thought. It was
guaranteed by the most powerful and authoritative of all so-
cial institutions.

Its seemingly solid foundation was, however, undermined
by the conclusions of modern science. They effected, both in
themselves and even more in the new interests and activities
they generated, a breach between what man is concerned with
here and now and the faith concerning ultimate reality which,
in determining his ultimate and eternal destiny, had previously
given regulation to his present life. The problem of restoring
integration and cooperation between man's beliefs about the
world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values and
purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem
of modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not
isolated from that life.

The attention which has been given to the fact that in its
experimental procedure science has surrendered the separa-
tion between knowing and doing has its source in the fact that
there is now provided within a limited, specialized and techni-
cal field the possibility and earnest, as far as theory is con-
cerned, of effecting the needed integration in the wider field
of collective human experience. Philosophy is called upon to
be the theory of the practice, through ideas sufficiently definite

255

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

to be operative in experimental endeavor, by which the inte-
gration may be made secure in actual experience. Its central
problem is the relation that exists between the beliefs about
the nature of things due to natural science to beliefs about
values using that word to designate whatever is taken to
have rightful authority in the direction of conduct. A philos-
ophy which should take up this problem is struck first of all
by the fact that beliefs about values are pretty much in the
position in which beliefs about nature were before the scientific
revolution. There is either a basic distrust of the capacity of
experience to develop its own regulative standards, and an
appeal to what philosophers call eternal values, in order to
ensure regulation of belief and action j or there is acceptance
of enjoyments actually experienced irrespective of the method
or operation by which they are brought into existence. Com-
plete bifurcation between rationalistic method and an empirical
method has its final and most deeply human significance in
the ways in which good and bad are thought of and acted for
and upon.

As far as technical philosophy reflects this situation, there
is division of theories of values into two kinds. On the one
hand, goods and evils, in every region of life, as they are con-
cretely experienced, are regarded as characteristic of an inferior
order of Being intrinsically inferior. Just because they are
things of human experience, their worth must be estimated by
reference to standards and ideals derived from ultimate real-
ity. Their defects and perversion are attributed to the same
factj they are to be corrected and controlled through adoption
of methods of conduct derived from loyalty to the require-
ments of Supreme Being. This philosophic formulation gets
actuality and force from the fact that it is a rendering of the
beliefs of men in general as far as they have come under the
influence of institutional religion. Just as rational conceptions

256

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD

were once superimposed upon observed and temporal phe-
nomena, so eternal values are superimposed upon experienced
goods. In one case as in the other, the alternative is supposed
to be confusion and lawlessness. Philosophers suppose these
eternal values are known by reason j the mass of persons that
they are divinely revealed.

Nevertheless, with the expansion of secular interests, tem-
poral values have enormously multiplied j they absorb more
and more attention and energy. The sense of transcendent
values has become enfeebled} instead of permeating all things
in life, it is more and more restricted to special times and acts.
The authority of the church to declare and impose divine will
and purpose has narrowed. Whatever men say and profess,
their tendency in the presence of actual evils is to resort to
natural and empirical means to remedy them. But in formal
belief, the old doctrine of the inherently disturbed and un-
worthy character of the goods and standards of ordinary ex-
perience persists. This divergence between what men do and
what they nominally profess is closely connected with the con-
fusions and conflicts of modern thought.

It is not meant to assert that no attempts have been made
to replace the older theory regarding the authority of immu-
table and transcendent values by conceptions more congruous
with the practices of daily life. The contrary is the case. The
utilitarian theory, to take one instance, has had great power.
The idealistic school is the only one in contemporary philoso-
phies, with the exception of one form of neo-realism, that
makes much of the notion of a reality which is all one with
ultimate moral and religious values. But this school is also
the one most concerned with the conservation of "spiritual"
life. Equally significant is the fact that empirical theories re-
tain the notion that thought and judgment are concerned with
values that are experienced independently of them. For these

257

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

theories, emotional satisfactions occupy the same place that
sensations hold in traditional empiricism. Values are consti-
tuted by liking and enjoyment; to be enjoyed and to be a value
are two names for one and the same fact. Since science has
extruded values from its objects, these empirical theories do
everything possible to emphasize their purely subjective char-
acter of value. A psychological theory of desire and liking is
supposed to cover the whole ground of the theory of values;
in it, immediate feeling is the counterpart of immediate
sensation.

I shall not object to this empirical theory as far as it con-
nects the theory of values with concrete experiences of desire
and satisfaction. The idea that there is such a connection is the
only way known to me by which the pallid remoteness of the
rationalistic theory, and the only too glaring presence of the
institutional theory of transcendental values can be escaped.
The objection is that the theory in question holds down value
to objects antecedently enjoyed, apart from reference to the
method by which they come into existence; it takes enjoyments
which are causal because unregulated by intelligent opera-
tions to be values in and of themselves. Operational thinking
needs to be applied to the judgment of values just as it has
now finally been applied in conceptions of physical objects.
Experimental empiricism in the field of ideas of good and bad
is demanded to meet the conditions of the present situation.

The scientific revolution came about when material of
direct and uncontrolled experience was taken as problematic;
as supplying material to be transformed by reflective operations
into known objects. The contrast between experienced and
known objects was found to be a temporal one; namely, one
between empirical subject-matters which were had or "given"
prior to the acts of experimental variation and redisposition
and those which succeeded these acts and issued from them.

258

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD

The notion of an act whether of sense or thought which sup-
plied a valid measure of thought in immediate knowledge was
discredited. Consequences of operations became the important
thing. The suggestion almost imperatively follows that es-
cape from the defects of transcendental absolutism is not to
be had by setting up as values enjoyments that happen any-
how, but in defining value by enjoyments which are the con-
sequences of intelligent action. Without the intervention of
thought, enjoyments are not values but problematic goods, be-
coming values when they re-issue in a changed form from in-
telligent behavior. The fundamental trouble with the current
empirical theory of values is that it merely formulates and
justifies the socially prevailing habit of regarding enjoyments
as they are actually experienced as values in and of themselves.
It completely side-steps the question of regulation of these
enjoyments. This issue involves nothing less than the problem
of the directed reconstruction of economic, political and reli-
gious institutions.

There was seemingly a paradox involved in the notion that
if we turned our backs upon the immediately perceived quali-
ties of things, we should be enabled to form valid conceptions
of objects, and that these conceptions could be used to bring
about a more secure and more significant experience of them.
But the method terminated in disclosing the connections or
interactions upon which perceived objects, viewed as events,
depend. Formal analogy suggests that we regard our direct and
original experience of things liked and enjoyed as only 'possi-
bilities of values to be achieved j that enjoyment becomes a
value when we discover the relations upon which its presence
depends. Such a causal and operational definition gives only a
conception of a value, not a value itself. But the utilization
of the conception in action results in an object having secure
and significant value.

259

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

The formal statement may be given concrete content by
pointing to the difference between the enjoyed and the en-
joyable, the desired and the desirable, the satisfying and the
satisfactory. To say that something is enjoyed is to make a
statement about a fact, something already in existence; it is
not to judge the value of that fact. There is no difference
between such a proposition and one which says that something
is sweet or sour, red or black. It is just correct or incorrect
and that is the end of the matter. But to call an object a value
is to assert that it satisfies or fulfills certain conditions. Func-
tion and status in meeting conditions is a different matter from
bare existence. The fact that something is desired only raises
the question of its desirability; it does not settle it. Only a
child in the degree of his immaturity thinks to settle the ques-
tion of desirability by reiterated proclamation: "I want it, I
want it, I want it." What is objected to in the current empirical
theory of values is not connection of them with desire and
enjoyment but failure to distinguish between enjoyments of
radically different sorts. There are many common expressions
in which the difference of the two kinds is clearly recog-
nized. Take for example the difference between the ideas of
"satisfying" and "satisfactory." To say that something satisfies
is to report something as an isolated finality. To assert that
it is satisfactory is to define it in its connections and interac-
tions. The fact that it pleases or is immediately congenial poses
a problem to judgment. How shall the satisfaction be rated?
Is it a value or is it not? Is it something to be prized and
cherished, to be enjoyed? Not stern moralists alone but every-
day experience informs us that finding satisfaction in a thing
may be a warning, a summons to be on the lookout for conse-
quences. To declare something satisfactory is to assert that it
meets specifiable conditions. It is, in effect, a judgment that the
thing "will do." It involves 'a prediction; it contemplates a

260

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD

future in which the thing will continue to serve} it will do. It
asserts a consequence the thing will actively institute; it will
do. That it is satisfying is the content of a proposition of fact;
that it is satisfactory is a judgment, an estimate, an appraisal.
It denotes an attitude to be taken, that of striving to perpetuate
and to make secure.

It is worth notice that besides the instances given, there
are many other recognitions in ordinary speech of the distinc-
tion. The endings "able," "worthy" and "ful" are cases in
point. Noted and notable, noteworthy; remarked and remark-
able; advised and advisable; wondered at and wonderful;
pleasing and beautiful; loved and lovable; blamed and blame-
able, blameworthy; objected to and objectionable; esteemed
and estimable; admired and admirable; shamed and shameful;
honored and honorable; approved and approvable, worthy of
approbation, etc. The multiplication of words adds nothing
to the force of the distinction. But it aids in conveying a sense
of the fundamental character of the distinction; of the differ-
ence between mere report of an already existent fact and judg-
ment as to the importance and need of bringing a fact into
existence; or, if it is already there, of sustaining it in existence.
The latter is a genuine practical judgment, and marks the only
type of judgment that has to do with the direction of action.
Whether or no we reserve the term "value" for the latter,
(as seems to me proper) is a minor matter; that the distinc-
tion be acknowledged as the key to understanding the rela-
tion of values to the direction of conduct is the important
thing.

This element of direction by an idea of value applies to
science as well as anywhere else. For in every scientific un-
dertaking, there is passed a constant succession of estimates;
such as "it is worth treating these facts as data or evidence;
it is advisable to try this experiment; to make that observation;

261

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

to entertain such and such a hypothesis} to perform this calcu-
lation," etc.

The word "taste" has perhaps got too completely associ-
ated with arbitrary liking to express the nature of judgments
of value. But if the word be used in the sense of an appre-
ciation at once cultivated and active, one may say that the for-
mation of taste is the chief matter wherever values enter in,
whether intellectual, esthetic or moral. Relatively immediate
judgments, which we call tact or to which we give the name
of intuition, do not precede reflective inquiry, but are the
funded products of much thoughtful experience. Expertness
of taste is at once the result and the reward of constant exer-
cise of thinking. Instead of there being no disputing about
tastes, they are the one thing worth disputing about, if by
"dispute" is signified discussion involving reflective inquiry.
Taste, if we use the word in its best sense, is the outcome of
experience brought cumulatively to bear on the intelligent ap-
preciation of the real worth of likings and enjoyments. There
is nothing in which a person so completely reveals himself as
in the things which he judges enjoyable and desirable. Such
judgments are the sole alternative to the domination of belief
by impulse, chance, blind habit and self-interest. The forma-
tion of a cultivated and effectively operative good judgment
or taste with respect to what is esthetically admirable, intel-
lectually acceptable and morally approvable is the supreme
task set to human beings by the incidents of experience.

Propositions about what is or has been liked are of instru-
mental value in reaching judgments of value, in as far as the
conditions and consequences of the thing liked are thought
about. In themselves they make no claims j they put forth no
demand upon subsequent attitudes and acts 5 they profess no
authority to direct. If one likes a thing he likes it} that is a
point about which there can be no dispute: although it is

262

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD

not so easy to state just what is liked as is frequently assumed.
A judgment about what is to be desired and enjoyed is, on the
other hand, a claim on future action j it possesses de jure and
not merely de facto quality. It is a matter of frequent experi-
ence that likings and enjoyments are of all kinds, and that
many are such as reflective judgments condemn. By way of
self -justification and "rationalization/' an enjoyment creates a
tendency to assert that the thing enjoyed is a value. This as-
sertion of validity adds authority to the fact. It is a decision
that the object has a right to exist and hence a claim upon
action to further its existence.

The analogy between the status of the theory of values
and the theory of ideas about natural objects before the rise
of experimental inquiry may be carried further. The sensa-
tionalistic theory of the origin and test of thought evoked, by
way of reaction, the transcendental theory of a priori ideas.
For it failed utterly to account for objective connection, order
and regularity in objects observed. Similarly, any doctrine
that identifies the mere fact of being liked with the value of
the object liked so fails to give direction to conduct when
direction is needed that it automatically calls forth the asser-
tion that there are values eternally in Being that are the
standards of all judgments and the obligatory ends of all ac-
tion. Without the introduction of operational thinking, we
oscillate between a theory that, in order to saye the objec-
tivity of judgments of values, isolates them from experience
and nature, and a theory that, in order to save their concrete
and human significance, reduces them to mere statements
about our own feelings.

Not even the most devoted adherents of the notion that
enjoyment and value are equivalent facts would venture to
assert that because we have once liked a thing we should go on
liking itj they are compelled* to introduce the idea that some

263

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

tastes are to be cultivated. Logically, there is no ground for
introducing the idea of cultivation j liking is liking, and one
is as good as another. If enjoyments are values, the judg-
ment of value cannot regulate the form which liking takes j
it cannot regulate its own conditions. Desire and purpose, and
hence action, are left without guidance, although the question
of regulation of their formation is the supreme problem of
practical life. Values (to sum up) may be connected inher-
ently with liking, and yet not with every liking but only with
those that judgment has approved, after examination of the
relation upon which the object liked depends. A casual liking
is one that happens without knowledge of how it occurs nor to
what effect. The difference between it and one which is sought
because of a judgment that it is worth having and is to be
striven for, makes just the difference between enjoyments
which are accidental and enjoyments that have value and hence
a claim upon our attitude and conduct.

In any case, the alternative rationalistic theory does not
afford the guidance for the sake of which eternal and immu-
table norms are appealed to. The scientist finds no help in
determining the probable truth of some proposed theory .by
comparing it with a standard of absolute truth and immutable
being. He has to rely upon definite operations undertaken
under definite conditions upon method. We can hardly imag-
ine an architect getting aid in the construction of a building
from an ideal at large, though we can understand his framing
an ideal on the basis of knowledge of actual conditions and
needs. Nor does the ideal of perfect beauty in antecedent
Being give direction to a painter in producing a particular work
of art. In morals, absolute perfection does not seem to be
more than a generalized hypostatization of the recognition that
there is a good to be sought, an obligation to be met both
being concrete matters. Nor is the defect in this respect merely

264

THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD

negative. An examination of history would reveal, I am con-
fident, that these general and remote schemes of value actually
obtain a content definite enough and near enough to concrete
situations as to afford guidance in action only by consecrating
some institution or dogma already having social currency.
Concreteness is gained, but it is by protecting from inquiry
some accepted standard which perhaps is outworn and in need
of criticism.

When theories of values do not afford intellectual assist-
ance in framing ideas and beliefs about values that are adequate
to direct action, the gap must be filled by other means. If intel-
ligent method is lacking, prejudice, the pressure of immediate
circumstance, self-interest and class-interest, traditional cus-
toms, institutions of accidental historic origin, are not lacking,
and' they tend to take the place of intelligence. Thus we are led
to our main proposition: Judgments about values are judg-
ments about the conditions and the results of experienced ob-
jects; judgments about that which should regulate the forma-
tion of our desires^ affections and enjoyments. For whatever
decides their formation will determine the main course of our
conduct, personal and social.

If it sounds strange to. hear that we should frame our
judgments as to what has value by considering the connections
in existence of what we like and enjoy, the reply is not far
to seek. As long as we do not engage in this inquiry enjoyments
(values if we choose to apply that term) are casual j they are
given by "nature," not constructed by art. Like natural ob-
jects in their qualitative existence, they at most only supply
material for elaboration in rational discourse. A feeling of
good or excellence is as far removed from goodness in fact
as a feeling that objects are intellectually thus and so is re-
moved from their being actually so. To recognize that the
truth of natural objects can be reached only by the greatest

265

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

care in selecting and arranging directed operations, and then
to suppose that values can be truly determined by the mere
fact of liking seems to leave us in an incredible position. All
the serious perplexities of life come back to the genuine diffi-
culty of forming a judgment as to the values of the situa-
tion} they come back to a conflict of goods. Only dogmatism
can suppose that serious moral conflict is between something
clearly bad and something known to be good, and that un-
certainty lies wholly in the will of the one choosing. Most
conflicts of importance are conflicts between things which are
or have been satisfying, not between good and evil. And to
suppose that we can make a hierarchical table of values at
large once for all, a kind of catalogue in which they are ar-
ranged in an order of ascending or descending: worth, is to
indulge in a gloss on our inability to frame intelligent judg-
ments in the concrete. Or else it is to dignify customary choice
and prejudice by a title of honor.

The alternative to definition, classification and systematiza-
tion of satisfactions just as they happen to occur is judgment
of them by means of the relations under which they occur.
If we know the conditions under which the act of liking, of
desire and enjoyment, takes place, we are in a position to
know what are the consequences of that act. The difference
between the desired and the desirable, admired and the ad-
mirable, becomes effective at just this point. Consider the
difference between the proposition "That thing has been
eaten," and the judgment "That thing is edible." The for-
mer statement involves no knowledge of any relation except
the one stated j while we are able to judge of the edibility of
anything only when we have a knowledge of its interactions
with other things sufficient to enable us to foresee its prob-
able effects when it is taken into the organism and produces
effects there.

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THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD

To assume that anything can be known in isolation from
its connections with other things is to identify knowing with
merely having some object before perception or in feeling,
and is thus to lose the key to the traits that distinguish an
object as known. It is futile, even silly, to suppose that some
quality that is directly present constitutes the whole of the
thing presenting the quality. It does not do so when the qual-
ity is that of being hot or fluid or heavy, and it does not when
the quality is that of giving pleasure, or being enjoyed. Such
qualities are, once more, effects, ends in the sense of closing
termini of processes involving causal connections. They are
something to be investigated, challenges to inquiry and judg-
ment. The more connections and interactions we ascertain,
the more we know the object in question. Thinking is search
for these connections. Heat experienced as a consequence of
directed operations has a meaning quite different from the heat
that is casually experienced without knowledge of how it came
about. The same is true of enjoyments. Enjoyments that issue
from conduct directed by insight into relations have a mean-
ing and a validity due to the way in which they are experi-
enced. Such enjoyments are not repented of; they generate
no after-taste of bitterness. Even in the midst of direct en-
joyment, there is a sense of validity, of authorization, which
intensifies the enjoyment. There is solicitude for perpetua-
tion of the object having value which is radically different
from mere anxiety to perpetuate the feeling of enjoyment.

Such statements as we have been making are, therefore,
far from implying that there are values apart from things
actually enjoyed as good. To find a thing enjoy#/<? is, so to
say, a plus enjoyment. We saw that it was foolish to treat
the scientific object as a rival to or substitute for the perceived
object, since the former is intermediate between uncertain
and settled situations and those experienced under conditions

267

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

of greater control. In the same way, judgment of the value
of an object to be experienced is instrumental to appreciation
of it when it is realized. But the notion that every object that
happens to satisfy has an equal claim with every other to be
a value is like supposing that every object of perception has
the same cognitive force as every other. There is no knowledge
without perception} but objects perceived are known only
when they are determined as consequences of connective op-
erations. There is no value except where there is satisfaction,
but there have to be certain conditions fulfilled to transform a
satisfaction into a value.

The time will come when it will be found passing strange
that we of this age should take such pains to control by every
means at command the formation of ideas of physical things,
even those most remote from human concern, and yet are
content with haphazard beliefs about the qualities of objects
that regulate our deepest interests} that we are scrupulous as
to methods of forming ideas of natural objects, and either
dogmatic or else driven by immediate conditions in framing
those about values. There is, by implication, if not explicitly,
a prevalent notion that values are already well known and that
all which is lacking is the will to cultivate them in the order of
their worth. In fact the most profound lack is not the will to
act upon goods already known but the will to know what they
are.

It is not a dream that it is possible to exercise some degree
of regulation of the occurrence of enjoyments which are of
value. Realization of the possibility is exemplified, for ex-
ample, in the technologies and arts of industrial life that
is, up to a definite limit. Men desired heat, light, and speed
of transit and of communication beyond what nature provides
of itself. These things have been attained not by lauding the
enjoyment of these things and preaching their desirability, but

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by study of the conditions of their manifestation. Knowledge
of relations having been obtained, ability to produce followed,
and enjoyment ensued as a matter of course. It is, however, an
old story that enjoyment of these things a3 goods is no war-
rant of their bringing only good in their train. As Plato was
given to pointing out, the physician may know to heal and
the orator to persuade, but the ulterior knowledge of whether
it is better for a man to be healed or to be persuaded to the
orator's opinion remains unsettled. Here there appears the
split between what are traditionally and conventionally called
the values of the baser arts and the higher values of the truly
personal and humane arts.

With respect to the former, there is no assumption that
they can be had and enjoyed without definite operative knowl-
edge. With respect to them it is also clear that the degree in
which we value them is measurable by the pains taken to con-
trol the conditions of their occurrence. With respect to the
latter, it is assumed that no one who is honest can be in doubt
what they arej that by revelation, or conscience, or the in-
struction of others, or immediate feeling, they are clear be-
yond question. And instead of action in their behalf being
taken to be a measure of the extent in which things are values
to us, it is assumed that the difficulty is to persuade men to
act upon what they already know to be good. Knowledge of
conditions and consequences is regarded as wholly indifferent
to judging what is of serious value, though it is useful in ^
prudential way in trying to actualize it. In consequence, the
existence of values that are by common consent of a secondary
and technical sort are under a fair degree of control, while
those denominated supreme and imperative are subject to all
the winds of impulse, custom and arbitrary authority.

This distinction between higher and lower types of value
is itself something to be looked into. Why should there be

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a sliarp division made between some goods as physical and
material and others as ideal and "spiritual"? The question
touches the whole dualism of the material and the ideal at its
root. To denominate anything "matter" or "material" is not in
truth to disparage it. It is, if the designation is correctly ap-
plied, a way of indicating that the thing in question is a con-
dition or means of the existence of something else. And
disparagement of effective means is practically synonymous
with disregard of the things that aer termed, in eulogistic
fashion, ideal and spiritual. For the latter terms if they have
any concrete application at all signify something which is a de-
sirable consummation of conditions, a cherished fulfillment of
means. The sharp separation between material and ideal good
thus deprives the latter of the underpinning of effective support
while it opens the way for treating things which should be em-
ployed as means as ends in themselves. For since men cannot
after all live without some measure of possession of such mat-
ters as health and wealth, the latter things will be viewed as
values and ends in isolation unless they are treated as integral
constituents of the goods that are deemed supreme and final.
The relations that determine the occurrence of what hu-
man beings experience, especially when social connections are
taken into account, are indefinitely wider and more complex
than those that determine the events termed physical} the
latter are the outcome of definite selective operations. This is
the reason why we know something about remote objects like
the stars better than we know significantly characteristic things
about our own bodies and minds. We forget the infinite num-
ber of things we do not know about the stars, or rather that
what we call a star is itself the product of the elimination,
enforced and deliberate, of most of the traits that belong to an
actual existence. The amount of knowledge we possess about
stars would not seem very great or very important if it were

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carried over to human beings and exhausted our knowledge
of them. It is inevitable that genuine knowledge of man and
society should lag far behind physical knowledge.

But this difference is not a ground for making a sharp
division between the two, nor does it account for the fact that
we make so little use of the experimental method of forming
our ideas and beliefs about the concerns of man in his char-
acteristic social relations. For this separation religions and
philosophies must admit some responsibility. They have erected
a distinction between a narrower scope of relations and a wider
and fuller one into a difference of kind, naming one kind mate-
rial, and the other mental and moral. They have charged
themselves gratuitously with the office of diffusing belief in
the necessity of the division, and with instilling contempt for
the material as something inferior in kind in its intrinsic na-
ture and worth. Formal philosophies undergo evaporation of
their technical solid contents j in a thinner and more viable
form they find their way into the minds of those who know
nothing of their original forms. When these diffuse and, so
to say, airy emanations re-crystallize in the popular mind they
form a hard deposit of opinion that alters slowly and with
great difficulty.

What difference would it actually make in the arts of con-
duct, personal and social, if the experimental theory were
adopted not as a mere theory, but as a part of the working
equipment of habitual attitudes on the part of everyone? It
would be impossible, even were time given, to answer the ques-
tion in adequate detail, just as men could not foretell in ad-
vance the consequences for knowledge of adopting the ex-
perimental method. It is the nature of the method that it has
to be tried. But there are generic lines of difference which,
within the limits of time at disposal, may be sketched.

Change from forming ideas and judgments of value on

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the basis of conformity to antecedent objects, to constructing
enjoyable objects directed by knowledge of consequences, is
a change from looking to the past to looking to the future.
I do not for a moment suppose that the experiences of the
past, personal and social, are of no importance. For with-
out them we should not be able to frame any ideas whatever
of the conditions under which objects are enjoyed nor any
estimate of the consequences of esteeming and liking them.
But past experiences are significant in giving us intellectual in-
strumentalities of judging just these points. They are tools,
not finalities. Reflection upon what we have liked and have
enjoyed is a necessity. But it tells us nothing about the value of
these things until enjoyments are themselves reflectively con-
trolled, or, until, as they now recalled, we form the best
judgment possible about what led us to like this sort of thing
and what has issued from the fact that we liked it.

We are not, then, to get away from enjoyments experi-
enced in the past and from recall of them, but from the no-
tion that they are the arbiters of things to be further enjoyed.
At present, the arbiter is found in the past, although there
are many ways of interpreting what in the past is authorita-
tive. Nominally, the most influential conception doubtless is
that of a revelation once had or a perfect life once lived. Re-
liance upon precedent, upon institutions created in the past, es-
pecially in law, upon rules of morals that have come to us
through unexamined customs, upon uncriticized tradition, are
other forms of dependence. It is not for a moment suggested
that we can get away from customs and established institu-
tions. A mere break would doubtless result simply in chaos.
But there is no danger of such a break. Mankind is too inertly
conservative both by constitution and by education to give the
idea of this danger actuality. What there is genuine danger of is
that the force of new conditions will produce disruption ex-

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ternally and mechanically: this is an ever present danger. The
prospect is increased, not mitigated, by that conservatism which
insists upon the adequacy of old standards to meet new con-
ditions. What is needed is intelligent examination of the con-
sequences that are actually effected by inherited institutions
and customs, in order that there may be intelligent considera-
tion of the ways in which they are to be intentionally modified
in behalf of generation of different consequences.

This is the significant meaning of transfer of experimental
method from the technical field of physical experience to the
wider field of human life. We trust the method in forming
our beliefs about things not directly connected with human
life. In effect, we distrust it in moral, political and economic
affairs. In the fine arts, there are many signs of a change. In
the past, such a change has often been an omen and precursor
of changes in other human attitudes. But, generally speak-
ing, the idea of actively adopting experimental method in
social affairs, in the matters deemed of most enduring and ulti-
mate worth, strikes most persons as a surrender of all stand-
ards and regulative authority. But in principle, experimental
method does not signify random and aimless action ; it implies
direction by ideas and knowledge. The question at issue is a
practical one. Are there in existence the ideas and the knowl-
edge that permit experimental method to be effectively used in
social interests and affairs?

Where will regulation come from if we surrender familiar
and traditionally prized values as our directive standards?
Very largely from the findings of the natural sciences. For
one of the effects of the separation drawn between knowledge
and action is to deprive scientific knowledge of its proper serv-
ice as a guide of conduct except once more in those techno-
logical fields which have been degraded to an inferior rank.
Of course, the complexity of the conditions upon which ob-

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jects of human and liberal value depend is a great obstacle,
and it would be too optimistic to say that we have as yet
enough knowledge of the scientific type to enable us to regu-
late our judgments of value very extensively. But we have
more knowledge than we try to put to use, and until we try
more systematically we shall not know what are the important
gaps in our sciences judged from the point of view of their
moral and humane use.

For moralists usually draw a sharp line between the field
of the natural sciences and the conduct that is regarded as
moral. But a moral that frames its judgments of value on the
basis of consequences must depend in a most intimate manner
upon the conclusions of science. For the knowledge of the
relations between changes which enable us to connect things
as antecedents and consequences is science. The narrow scope
which moralists often give to morals, their isolation of some
conduct as virtuous and vicious from other large ranges of
conduct, those having to do with health and vigor, business,
education, with all the affairs in which desires and affection
are implicated, is perpetuated by this habit of exclusion of the
subject-matter of natural science from a role in formation of
moral standards and ideals. The same attitude operates in the
other direction to keep natural science a technical specialty,
and it works unconsciously to encourage its use exclusively in
regions where it can be turned to personal and class advantage,
as in war and trade.

Another great difference to be made by carrying the ex-
perimental habit into all matter of practice is that it cuts the
roots of what is often called subjectivism, but which is bet-
ter termed egoism. The subjective attitude is much more wide-
spread than would be inferred from the philosophies which
have that label attached. It is as rampant in realistic philoso-
phies as in any others, sometimes even more so, although dis-

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guised from those who hold these philosophies under the cover
of reverence of and enjoyment of ultimate values. For the
implication of placing the standard of thought and knowledge
in antecedent existence is that our thought makes no differ-
ence in what is significantly real. It then affects only our own
attitude toward it.

This constant throwing of emphasis back upon a change
made in ourselves instead of one made in the world in which
we live seems to me the essence of what is objectionable in
"subjectivism." Its taint hangs about even Platonic realism
with its insistent evangelical dwelling upon the change made
within the mind by contemplation of the realm of essence,
and its depreciation of action as transient and all but sordid
a concession to the necessities of organic existence. All the
theories which put conversion a of the eye of the soul" in the
place of a conversion of natural and social objects that modifies
goods actually experienced, is a retreat and escape from ex-
istence and this retraction into self is, once more, the heart
of subjective egoisms. The typical example is perhaps the
other-worldliness found in religions whose chief concern is
with the salvation of the personal soul. But other-worldliness
is found as well in estheticism and in all seclusion within ivory
towers.

It is not in the least implied that change in personal atti-
tudes, in the disposition of the "subject," is not of great im-
portance. Such change, on the contrary, is involved in any at-
tempt to modify the conditions of the environment. But there
is a radical difference between a change in the self that is
cultivated and valued as an end, and one that is a means to
alteration, through action, of objective conditions. The Aris-
totelian-medieval conviction that highest bliss is found in con-
templative possession of ultimate Being presents an ideal at-
tractive to some types of mindj it sets forth a refined sort of

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enjoyment. It is a doctrine congenial to minds that despair of
the effort involved in creation of a better world of daily ex-
perience. It is, apart from theological attachments, a doctrine
sure to recur when social conditions are so troubled as to
make actual endeavor seem hopeless. But the subjectivism so
externally marked in modern thought as compared with an-
cient is either a development of the old doctrine under new
conditions or is of merely technical import. The medieval
version of the doctrine at least had the active support of a
great social institution by means of which man could be
brought into the state of mind that prepared him for ultimate
enjoyment of eternal Being. It had a certain solidity and depth
which is lacking in modern theories that would attain the re-
sult by merely emotional or speculative procedures, or by any
means not demanding a change in objective existence so as to
render objects of value more empirically secure.

The nature in detail of the revolution that would be
wrought by carrying into the region of values the principle
now embodied in scientific practice cannot be told; to attempt
it would violate the fundamental idea that we know only after
we have acted and in consequences of the outcome of action.
But it would surely effect a transfer of attention and energy
from the subjective to the objective. Men would think of
themselves as agents not as endsj ends would be found in
experienced enjoyment of the fruits of a transforming ac-
tivity. In as far as the subjectivity of modern thought repre-
sents a discovery of the part played by personal responses,
organic and acquired, in the causal production of the qualities
and values of objects, it marks the possibility of a decisive
gain. It puts us in possession of some of the conditions that
control the occurrence of experienced objects, and thereby it
supplies us with an instrument of regulation. There is some-
thing querulous in the sweeping denial that things as experi-

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THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD

enced, as perceived and enjoyed, in any way depend upon in-
teraction with human selves. The error of doctrines that have
exploited the part played by personal and subjective reactions
in determining what is perceived and enjoyed lies either in
exaggerating this factor of constitution into the sole condition
as happens in subjective idealism or else in treating it as a
finality instead of, as with all knowledge, an instrument in
direction of further action.

A third significant change that would issue from carrying
over experimental method from physics to man concerns the
import of standards, principles, rules. With the transfer, these,
and all tenets and creeds about good and goods, would be
recognized to be hypotheses. Instead of being rigidly fixed,
they would be treated as intellectual instruments to be tested
and confirmed and altered through consequences effected
by acting upon them. They would lose all pretence of finality
the ulterior source of dogmatism. It is both astonishing and
depressing that so much of the energy of mankind has gone
into fighting for (with weapons of the flesh as well as of the
spirit) the truth of creeds, religious, moral and political, as
distinct from what has gone into effort to try creeds by put-
ting them to the test of acting upon them. The change would
do away with the intolerance and fanaticism that attend the
notion that beliefs and judgments are capable of inherent truth
and authority} inherent in the sense of being independent of
what they lead to when used as directive principles. The trans-
formation does not imply merely that men are responsible
for acting upon what they profess to believe } that is an old
doctrine. It goes much further. Any belief as such is tentative,
hypothetical} it is not just to be acted upon, but is to be framed
with reference to its office as a guide to action. Consequently,
it should be the last thing in the world to be picked up casually
and then clung to rigidly. When it is apprehended as a tool

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

and only a tool, an instrumentality of direction, the same
scrupulous attention will go to its formation as now goes into
the making of instruments of precision in technical fields.
Men, instead of being proud of accepting and asserting beliefs
and "principles" on the ground of loyalty, will be as ashamed
of that procedure as they would now be to confess their as-
sent to a scientific theory out of reverence for Newton or
Helmholz or whomever, without regard to evidence.

If one stops to consider the matter, is there not something
strange in the fact that men should consider loyalty to "laws,"
principles, standards, ideals to be an inherent virtue, accounted
unto them for righteousness? It is as if they were making up
for some secret sense of weakness by rigidity and intensity of
insistent attachment. A moral law, like a law in physics, is
not something to swear by and stick to at all hazards; it is a
formula of the way to respond when specified conditions pre-
sent themselves. Its soundness and pertinence are tested by
what happens when it is acted upon. Its claim or authority
rests finally upon the imperativeness of the situation that has to
be dealt with, not upon its own intrinsic nature as any tool
achieves dignity in the measure of needs served by it. The
idea that adherence to standards external to experienced objects
is the only alternative to confusion and lawlessness was once
held in science. But knowledge became steadily progressive
when it was abandoned, and clews and tests found within con-
crete acts and objects were employed. The test of consequences
is more exacting than that afforded by fixed general rules. In
addition, it secures constant development, for when new acts
are tried new results are experienced, while the lauded immu-
tability of eternal ideals and norms is in itself a denial of the
possibility of development and improvement.

The various modifications that would result from adop-
tion in social and humane subjects of the experimental way

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THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD

of thinking are perhaps summed up in saying that it would
place method, and means upon the level of importance that
has, in the past, been imputed exclusively to ends. Means
have been regarded as menial, and the useful as the servile.
Means have been treated as poor relations to be endured, but
not inherently welcome. The very meaning of the word
"ideals" is significant of the divorce which has obtained be-
tween means and ends. "Ideals" are thought to be remote and
inaccessible of attainment} they are too high and fine to be
sullied by realization. They serve vaguely to arouse "aspira-
tion," but they do not evoke and direct strivings for embodi-
ment in actual existence. They hover in an indefinite way
over the actual scene ; they are expiring ghosts of a once signifi-
cant kingdom of divine reality whose rule penetrated to every
detail of life.

It is impossible to form a just estimate of the paralysis
of effort that has been produced by indifference to means.
Logically, it is truistic that lack of consideration for means
signifies that so-called ends are not taken seriously. It is as if
one professed devotion to painting pictures conjoined with con-
tempt for canvas, brush and paints; or love of music on con-
dition that no instruments, whether the voice or something
external, be used to make sounds. The good workman in the
arts is known by his respect for his tools and by his interest
in perfecting his technique. The glorification in the arts of ends
at the expense of means would be taken to be a sign of
complete insincerity or even insanity. Ends separated from
means are either sentimental indulgences or if they happen to
exist are merely accidental. The ineffectiveness in action of
"ideals" is due precisely to the supposition that means and ends
are not on exactly the same level with respect to the atten-
tion and care they demand.

It is, however, much easier to point out the formal con-

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

tradiction implied in ideals that are professed without equal
regard for the instruments and techniques of their realization,
than it is to appreciate the concrete ways in which belief in
their separation has found its way into life and borne corrupt
and poisonous fruits. The separation marks the form in which
the traditional divorce of theory and practice has expressed
itself in actual life. It accounts for the relative impotency of
arts concerned with enduring human welfare. Sentimental at-
tachment and subjective eulogy take the place of action. For
there is no art without tools and instrumental agencies. But
it also explains the fact that in actual behavior, energies de-
voted to matters nominally thought to be inferior, material and
sordid, engross attention and interest. After a polite and pious
deference has been paid to "ideals," men feel free to devote
themselves to matters which are more immediate and pressing.
It is usual to condemn the amount of attention paid by
people in general to material ease, comfort, wealth, and suc-
cess gained by competition, on the ground that they give to
mere means the attention that ought to -be given to ends, or that
they have taken for ends things which in reality are only
means. Criticisms of the place which economic interest and
action occupy in present life are full of complaints that men
allow lower aims to usurp the place that belongs to higher and
ideal values. The final source of the trouble is, however, that
moral and spiritual "leaders" have propagated the notion
that ideal ends may be cultivated in isolation from "mate-
rial" means, as if means and material were not synonymous.
While they condemn men for giving to means the thought
and energy that ought to go to ends, the condemnation should
go to them. For they have not taught their followers to think
of material and economic activities as really means. They have
been unwilling to frame their conception of the values that
should be regulative of human conduct on the basis of the

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THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD

actual conditions and operations by which alone values can be
actualized.

Practical needs are imminent j with the mass of mankind
they are imperative. Moreover, speaking generally, men are
formed to act rather than to theorize. Since the ideal ends
are so remotely and accidentally connected with immediate
and urgent conditions that need attention, after lip service is
given to them, men naturally devote themselves to the latter.
If a bird in the hand is worth two in a neighboring bush, an
actuality in hand is worth, for the direction of conduct, many
ideals that are so remote as to be invisible and inaccessible.
Men hoist the banner of the ideal, and then march in the direc-
tion that concrete conditions suggest and reward.

Deliberate insincerity and hypocrisy are rare. But the no-
tion that action and sentiment are inherently unified in the con-
stitution of human nature has nothing to justify it. Integration
is something to be achieved. Division of attitudes and re-
sponses, compartmentalizing of interests, is easily acquired. It
goes deep just because the acquisition is unconscious, a mat-
ter of habitual adaptation to conditions. Theory separated
from concrete doing and making is empty and futile; practice
then becomes an immediate seizure of opportunities and en-
joyments which conditions afford without the direction which
theory knowledge and ideas has power to supply. The
problem of the relation of theory and practice is not a prob-
lem of theory alone j it is that, but it is also the most practical
problem of life. For it is the question of how intelligence
may inform action, and how action may bear the fruit of in-
creased insight into meaning: a clear view of the values that are
worth while and of the means by which they are to be made
secure in experienced objects. Construction of ideals in general
and their sentimental glorification are easy; the responsibilities
both of studious thought and of action are shirked. Persons

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

having the advantage of positions of leisure and who find
pleasure in abstract theorizing a most delightful indulgence
to those to whom it appeals have a large measure of liability
for a cultivated diffusion of ideals and aims that are sepa-
rated from the conditions which are the means of actualization.
Then other persons who find themselves in positions of social
power and authority readily claim to be the bearers and de-
fenders of ideal ends in church and state. They then use the
prestige and authority their representative capacity as guardians
of the highest ends confers on them to cover actions taken in
behalf of the harshest and narrowest of material ends.

The present state of industrial life seems to give a fair
index of the existing separation of means and ends. Isolation
of economics from ideal ends, whether of morals or of or-
ganized social life, was proclaimed by Aristotle. Certain things,
he said, are conditions of a worthy life, personal and social,
but are not constituents of it. The economic life of man, con-
cerned with satisfaction of wants, is of this nature. Men have
wants and they must be satisfied. But they are only prerequi-
sites of a good life, not intrinsic elements in it. Most philoso-
phers have not been so frank nor perhaps so logical. But upon
the whole, economics has been treated as on a lower level than
either morals or politics. Yet the life which men, women and
children actually lead, the opportunities open to them, the
values they are capable of enjoying, their education, their
share in all the things of art and science, are mainly deter-
mined by economic conditions. Hence we can hardly expect
a moral system which ignores economic conditions to be other
than remote and empty.

Industrial life is correspondingly brutalized by failure to
equate it as the means by which social and cultural values are
realized. That the economic life, thus exiled from the pale of
higher values, takes revenge by declaring that it is the only

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reality, and by means of the doctrine of materialistic
determination of institutions and conduct in all fields, denies
to deliberate morals and politics any share of causal regulation,
is not surprising.

When economists were told that their subject-matter was
merely material, they naturally thought they could be "scien-
tific" only by excluding all reference to distinctively human
values. Material wants, efforts to satisfy them, even the
scientifically regulated technologies highly developed in indus-
trial activity, are then taken to form a complete and closed
field. If any reference to social ends and values is intro-
duced it is by way of an external addition, mainly hortatory.
That economic life largely determines the conditions under
which mankind has access to concrete values may be recognized
or it may not be. In either case, the notion that it is the means
to be utilized in order to secure significant values as the com-
mon and shared possession of mankind is alien and inopera-
tive. To many persons, the idea that the ends professed by
morals are impotent save as they are connected with the work-
ing machinery of economic life seems like deflowering the
purity of moral values and obligations.

The social and moral effects of the separation of theory
and practice have been merely hinted at. They are so mani-
fold and so pervasive that an adequate consideration of them
would involve nothing less than a survey of the whole field
of morals, economics and politics. It cannot be justly stated
that these effects are in fact direct consequences of the quest for
certainty by thought and knowledge isolated from action. For,
as we have seen, this quest was itself a reflex product of actual
conditions. But it may be truly asserted that this quest, under-
taken in religion and philosophy, has had results which have
reinforced the conditions which originally brought it about.
Moreover, search for safety and consolation amid the perils

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

of life by means other than intelligent action, by feeling and
thought alone, began when actual means of control were lack-
ing, when arts were undeveloped. It had then a relative his-
toric justification that is now lacking. The primary problem
for thinking which lays claim to be philosophic in its breadth
and depth is to assist in bringing about a reconstruction of all
beliefs rooted in a basic separation of knowledge and action j
to develop a system of operative ideas congruous with present
knowledge and with present facilities of control over natural
events and energies.

We have noted more than once how modern philosophy
has been absorbed in the problem of affecting an adjustment
between the conclusions of natural science and the beliefs and
values that have authority in the direction of life. The genuine
and poignant issue does not reside where philosophers for the
most part have placed it. It does not consist in accommodation
to each other of two realms, one physical and the other ideal
and spiritual, nor in the reconciliation of the "categories" of
theoretical and practical reason. It is found in that isolation of
executive means and ideal interests which has grown up under
the influence of the separation of theory and practice. For this,
by nature, involves the separation of the material and the
spiritual. Its solution, therefore, can be found only in action
wherein the phenomena of material and economic life are
equated with the purposes that command the loyalties of
affection and purpose, and in which ends and ideals are
framed in terms of the possibilities of actually experienced
situations. But while the solution cannot be found in "thought"
alone, it can be furthered by thinking which is operative
which frames and defines ideas in terms of what may be done,
and which uses the conclusions of science as instrumentalities.
William James was well within the bounds of moderation
when he said that looking forward instead of backward, look-

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ing to what the world and life might become instead of to what
they have been, is an alteration in the "seat of authority."

It was incidentally remarked earlier in our discussion that
the serious defect in the current empirical philosophy of values,
the one which identifies them with things actually enjoyed
irrespective of the conditions upon which they depend, is that
it formulates and in so far consecrates the conditions of our
present social experience. Throughout these chapters, primary
attention has perforce been given to the methods and state-
ments of philosophic theories. But these statements are tech-
nical and specialized in formulation only. In origin, content
and import they are reflections of some condition or some
phase of concrete human experience. Just as the theory of the
separation of theory and practice has a practical origin and a
momentous practical consequence, so the empirical theory that
values are identical with whatever men actually enjoy, no mat-
ter how or what, formulates an aspect, and an undesirable one,
of the present social situation.

For while our discussion has given more attention to the
other type of philosophical doctrine, that which holds that
regulative and authoritative standards are found in transcend-
ent eternal values, it has not passed in silence over the fact that
actually the greater part of the activities of the greater number
of human beings is spent in effort to seize upon and hold onto
such enjoyments as the actual scene permits. Their energies and
their enjoyments are controlled in fact, but they are controlled
by external conditions rather than by intelligent judgment and
endeavor. If philosophies have any influence over the thoughts
and acts of men, it is a serious matter that the most widely held
empirical theory should in effect justify this state of things
by identifying values with the objects of any interest as such.
As long as the only theories of value placed before us for in-
tellectual assent alternate between sending us to a realm of

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eternal and fixed values and sending us to enjoyments such as
actually obtain, the formulation, even as only a theory, of an
experimental empiricism which finds values to be identical with
goods that are the fruit of intelligently directed activity has
its measure of practical significance.

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CHAPTER XI
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION

KANT CLAIMED THAT he had effected a Copernican evolution
in philosophy by treating the world and our knowledge of it
from the standpoint of the knowing subject. To most critics,
the endeavor to make the known world turn on the constitu-
tion of the knowing mind, seems like a return to an ultra-
Ptolemaic system. But Copernicus, as Kant understood him,
effected a straightening out of astronomical phenomena by
interpreting their perceived movements from their relation
to the perceiving subject, instead of treating them as inherent
in the things perceived. The revolution of the sun about the
earth as it offers itself to sense-perception was regarded as
due to the conditions of human observation and not to the
movements of the sun itself. Disregarding the consequences
of the changed point of view, Kant settled upon this one
feature as characteristic of the method of Copernicus. He
thought he could generalize this feature of Copernican
method, and thus clear up a multitude of philosophical diffi-
culties by attributing the facts in question to the constitution
of the human subject in knowing.

That the consequence was Ptolemaic rather than Coper-
nican is not to be wondered at. In fact, the alleged revolution
of Kant consisted in making explicit what was implicit in the
classic tradition. In words, the latter had asserted that knowl-
edge is determined by the objective constitution of the universe.
But it did so only after it had first assumed that the universe
is itself constituted after the pattern of reason. Philosophers

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first constructed a rational system of nature and then borrowed
from it the features by which to characterize their knowledge
of it. Kant, in effect, called attention to the borrowing j he
insisted that credit for the borrowed material be assigned to
human reason instead of to divine. His "revolution" was a
shift from a theological to a human authorship j beyond that
point, it was an explicit acknowledgment of what philosophers
in the classic line of descent had been doing unconsciously
before him. For the basic assumption of this tradition was the
inherent correspondence subsisting between intellectus and the
structure of Nature the principle so definitely stated by
Spinoza. By the time of Kant difficulties in this rationalistic
premise had become evident. He thought to maintain the
underlying idea and remedy the perplexities it entailed by
placing the locus of intellect in man as a knowing subject.
The irritation which this performance arouses in some minds
is due rather to this transfer than to any doubt about the valid
function of reason in the constitution of nature.

Kant refers incidentally to the experimental method of
Galileo as an illustration of the way in which thought actually
takes the lead, so that an object is known because of conformity
to a prior conception: because of its conformity to the speci-
fications of the latter. The reference makes clear by contrast
the genuine reversal contained in the experimental way of
knowing. It is true that experimentation proceeds on the basis
of a directive idea. But the difference between the office of the
idea in determining a known object and the office assigned
to it in Kant's theory is as great as between the Copernican
and the Ptolemaic systems. For an idea in experiment is tenta-
tive, conditional, not fixed and rigorously determinative. It
controls an action to be performed, but the consequences of
the operation determine the worth of the directive idea} the
latter does not fix the nature of the object.

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Moreover, in experiment everything takes place above-
board, in the open. Every step is overt and capable of being
observed. There is a specified antecedent state of things; a
specified operation using means, both physical and symbolic,
which are externally exhibited and reported. The entire process
by which the conclusion is reached that such and such a judg-
ment of an object is valid is overt. It can be repeated step by
step by any one. Thus every one can judge for himself whether
or not the conclusion reached as to the object justifies assertion
of knowledge, or whether there are gaps and deflections. More-
over, the whole process goes on where other existential proc-
esses go on, in time. There is a temporal sequence as definitely
as in any art, as in, say, the making of cotton cloth from gin-
ning of raw material, through carding and spinning to the op-
eration of the loom. A public and manifest series of definite
operations, all capable of public notice and report, distinguishes
scientific knowing from the knowing carried on by inner "men-
tal" processes accessible only to introspection, or inferred by
dialectic from assumed premises.

There is accordingly opposition rather than agreement
between the Kantian determination of objects by thought and
the determination by thought that takes place in experimenta-
tion. There is nothing hypothetical or conditional about Kant's
forms of perception and conception. They work uniformly
and triumphantly; they need no differential testing by conse-
quences. The reason Kant postulates them is to secure uni-
versality and necessity instead of the hypothetical and the prob-
able. Nor is there anything overt, observable and temporal or
historical in the Kantian machinery. Its work is done behind
the scenes. Only the result is observed, and only an elaborate
process of dialectic inference enables Kant to assert the exist-
ence of his apparatus of forms and categories. These are as
inaccessible to observation as were the occult forms and essences

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whose rejection was a prerequisite of development of modern
science.

These remarks are not directed particularly against Kant.
For, as has been already said, he edited a new version of old
conceptions about mind and its activities in knowing, rather
than evolved a brand new theory. But since he happens to be
the author of the phrase "Copernican revolution," his phi-
losophy forms a convenient point of departure for considera-
tion of a genuine reversal of traditional ideas about the mind,
reason, conceptions, and mental processes. Phases of this revo-
lution have concerned us in the previous lectures. We have seen
how the opposition between knowing and doing, theory and
practice, has been abandoned in the actual enterprise of scien-
tific inquiry, how knowing goes forward by means of doing.
We have seen how the cognitive quest for absolute certainty
by purely mental means has been surrendered in behalf of
search for a security, having a high degree of probability, by
means of preliminary active regulation of conditions. We have
considered some of the definite steps by which security has
come to attach to regulation of change rather than absolute
certainty to the unchangeable. We have noted how in con-
sequence of this transformation the standard of judgment
has been transferred from antecedents to consequents, from
inert dependence upon the past to intentional construction of
a future.

If such changes do not constitute, in the depth and scope
of their significance, a reversal comparable to a Copernican
revolution, I am at a loss to know where such a change can
be found or what it would be like. The old center was mind
knowing by means of an equipment of powers complete within
itself, and merely exercised upon an antecedent external mate-
rial equally complete in itself. The new center is indefinite
interactions taking place within a course of nature which is

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not fixed and complete, but which is capable of direction to
new and different results through the mediation of inten-
tional operations. Neither self nor world, neither soul nor
nature (in the sense of something isolated and finished in its
isolation) is the center, any more than either earth or sun is
the absolute center of a single universal and necessary frame
of reference. There is a moving whole of interacting parts j
a center emerges wherever there is effort to change them in a
particular direction.

The reversal has many phases, and these are intercon-
nected. It cannot be said that one is more important than
another. But one change stands out with an extraordinary dis-
tinctness. Mind is no longer a spectator beholding the world
from without and finding its highest satisfaction in the joy
of self-sufficing contemplation. The mind is within the world
as a part of the latter's own on-going process. It is marked off
as mind by the fact that wherever it is found, changes take
place in a directed way, so that a movement in a definite one-
way sense from the doubtful and confused to the clear, re-
solved and settled takes place. From knowing as an outside
beholding to knowing as an active participant in the drama of
an on-moving world is the historical transition whose record we
have been following.

As far as philosophy is concerned, the first direct and im-
mediate effect of this shift from knowing which makes a differ-
ence to the knower but none in the world, to knowing which
is a directed change within the world, is the complete abandon-
ment of what we may term the intellectualist fallacy. By this
is meant something which may also be termed the ubiquity of
knowledge as a measure of reality. Of the older philosophies,
framed before experimental knowing had made any significant
progress, it may be said that they made a definite separation
between the world in which man thinks and knows and the

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world in which he lives and acts. In his needs and in the acts
that spring from them, man was a part of the world, a sharer
in its fortunes, sometimes willingly, sometimes per force} he
was exposed to its vicissitudes and at the mercy of its irregular
and unforeseeable changes. By acting in and upon the world
he made his earthly way, sometimes failing, sometimes achiev-
ing. He was acted upon by it, sometimes carried forward to
unexpected glories and sometimes overwhelmed by its disfavor.

Being unable to cope with the world in which he lived, he
sought some way to come to terms with the universe as a
whole. Religion was, in its origin, an expression of this en-
deavor. After a time, a few persons with leisure and endowed
by fortune with immunity from the rougher impacts of the
world, discovered the delights of thought and inquiry. They
reached the conclusion that through rational thought they
could rise about the natural world in which, with their body
and those mental processes that were connected with the body,
they lived. In striving with the inclemencies of nature, suffer-
ing its buffetings, wresting sustenance from its resources, they
were parts of Nature. But in knowledge, true knowledge which
is rational, occupied with objects that are universal and im-
mutable, they escaped from the world of vicissitude and uncer-
tainty. They were elevated above the realm in which needs
are felt and laborious effort imperative. In rising above this
world of sense and time, they came into rational communion
with the divine which was untroubled and perfect mind. They
became true participants in the realm of ultimate reality.
Through knowledge, they were without the world of chance
and change, and within the world of perfect and unchanging
Being.

How far this glorification by philosophers and scientific
investigators of a life of knowing, apart from and above a life
of doing, might have impressed the popular mind without

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THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION

adventitious aid there is no saying. But external aid came.
Theologians of the Christian Church adopted this view in a
form adapted to their religious purposes. The perfect and ulti-
mate reality was Godj to know Him was eternal bliss. The
world in which man lived and acted was a world of trials and
troubles to test and prepare him for a higher destiny. Through
thousands of ways, including histories and rites, with symbols
that engaged the emotions and imagination, the essentials of
the doctrine of classic philosophy filtered its way into the
popular mind.

It would be a one-sided view which held that this story
gives the entire account of the elevation of knowing and its
object above practical action and its objects. A contributing
cause was found in the harshness, cruelties and tragic frustra-
tions of the world of action. Were it not for its brutalities and
failures, the motive for seeking refuge in a higher realm of
knowledge would have been lacking. It was easy and, as we say,
"natural" to associate these evils with the fact that the world
in which we act is a realm of change. The generic fact of
change was made absolute and the source of all the troubles
and defects of the world in which we directly live. At the
very best, good and excellence are insecure in a world of
change; good can be securely at home only in a realm of fixed
unchanging substance. When the source of evil was once as-
serted to reside in the inherent deficiencies of a realm of
change, responsibility was removed from human ignorance,
incapacity and insusceptibility. It remained only to change our
own attitude and disposition, to turn the soul from perish-
able things toward perfect Being. In this idea religion stated
in one language precisely what the great philosophic tradition
stated in another.

Nor is this the whole of the story. There was, strangely
enough, a definitely practical ground for the elevation of

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

knowledge above doing and making. Whenever knowledge
is actually obtained, a measure of security through ability to
control ensues. There is a natural inclination to treat value
as a measure of reality. Since knowledge is the mode of expe-
rience that puts in our hands the key to controlling our other
dealings with experienced objects, it has a central position.
There is no practical point gained in asserting that a thing is
what it is experienced to be apart from knowledge. If a man
has typhoid fever, he has itj he does not have to search for
or pry into it. But to know it, he does have to search: to
thought, to intellect, the fever is what it is known to be. For
when it is known, the various phenomena of having it, the
direct experiences, fall into order j we have at least that kind
of control called understanding, and with this comes the pos-
sibility of a more active control. The very fact that other
experiences speak, so to say, for themselves makes it uneces-
sary to ask what they are. When the nature of an existence
is in doubt and we have to seek for it, the idea of reality is
consciously present. Hence the thought of existence becomes
exclusively associated with knowing. Other ways of experi-
encing things exist so obviously that we do not think of
existence in connection with them.

At all events, whatever the explanation, the idea that cog-
nition is the measure of the reality found in other modes of
experience is the most widely distributed premise of philoso-
phies. The equation of the real and the known comes to ex-
plicit statement in idealistic theories. If we remind ourselves
of the landscape with trees and grasses waving in the wind
and waves dancing in sunlight, we recall how scientific thought
of these things strips off the qualities significant in perception
and direct enjoyment, leaving only certain physical constants
stated in mathematical formulae. What is more natural, then,
than to call upon mind to reclothe by some contributory act

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THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION

of thought or consciousness the grim skeleton offered by sci-
ence? Then if only it can be shown that mathematical rela-
tions are themselves a logical construction of thought, the
knowing mind is enstated as the constitutive author of the
whole scheme. Realistic theories have protested against doc-
trines that make the knowing mind the source of the thing
known. But they have held to a doctrine of a partial equation
of the real and the known j only they have read the equation
from the side of the object instead of the subject. Knowledge
must be the grasp or vision of the real as it "is in itself," while
emotions and affections deal with it as it is affected with an
alien element supplied by the feeling and desiring subject. The
postulate of the unique and exclusive relation among experi-
enced things of knowledge and the real is shared by epistemo-
logical idealist and realist.

The meaning of a Copernican reversal is that we do not
have to go to knowledge to obtain an exclusive hold on reality.
The world as we experience it is a real world. But it is not
in its primary phases a world that is known, a world that is
understood, and is intellectually coherent and secure. Knowing
consists of operations that give experienced objects a form in
which the relations, upon which the onward course of events
depends, are securely experienced. It marks a transitional
redirection and rearrangement of the real. It is intermediate
and instrumental} it comes between a relatively casual and
accidental experience of existence and one relatively settled
and defined. The knower is within the world of existence j his
knowing, as experimental, marks an interaction of one existence
with other existences. There is, however, a most important
difference between it and other existential interactions. The
difference is not between something going on within nature as a
part of itself and something else taking place outside it, but is
that between a regulated course of changes and an uncontrolled

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THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

one. In knowledge, causes become means and effects become
consequences, and thereby things have meanings. The known
object is an antecedent object as that is intentionally rearranged
and redisposed, an eventual object whose value is tested by
the reconstruction it effects. It emerges, as it were, from the
fire of experimental thought as a refined metal issues from
operations performed on crude material. It is the same object
but the same object with a difference, as a man who has been
through conditions which try the temper of his being comes
out the same man and a different man.

Knowledge then does not encompass the world as a whole.
But the fact that it is not coextensive with experienced existence
is no defect nor failure on its part. It is an expression of the
fact that knowledge attends strictly to its own business:
transformation of disturbed and unsettled situations into those
more controlled and more significant. Not all existence asks
to be known, and it certainly does not ask leave from thought
to exist. But some existences as they are experienced do ask
thought to direct them in their course so that they may be
ordered and fair and be such as to commend themselves to
admiration, approval and appreciation. Knowledge affords the
sole means by which this redirection can be effected. As the
latter is brought about, parts of the experienced world have
more luminous and organized meaning and their significance
is rendered more secure against the gnawing tooth of time.
The problem of knowledge is the problem of discovery of
methods for carrying on this enterprise of redirection. It is a
problem never ended, always in process} one problematic situa-
tion is resolved and another takes its place. The constant gain
is not in approximation to universal solution but in betterment
of methods and enrichment of objects experienced.

Man as a natural creature acts as masses and molecules
act} he lives as animals live, eating, fighting, fearing, repro-

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ducing. As he lives, some of his actions yield understanding
and things take on meaning, for they become signs of one
another j means of expectation and of recall, preparations for
what is to come and celebrations of what has gone. Activities
take on ideal quality. Attraction and repulsion become love of
the admirable and hate of the harsh and ugly, and they seek
to find and make a world in which they may be securely at
home. Hopes and fears, desires and aversions, are as truly
responses to things as are knowing and thinking. Our affec-
tions, when they are enlightened by understanding, are organs
by which we enter into the meaning of the natural world as
genuinely as by knowing, and with greater fullness and inti-
macy. This deeper and richer intercourse with things can be
effected only by thought and its resultant knowledge} the arts
in which the potential meanings of nature are realized demand
an intermediate and transitional phase of detachment and
abstraction. The colder and less intimate transactions of know-
ing involve temporary disregard of the qualities and values
to which our affections and enjoyments are attached. But
knowledge is an indispensable medium of our hopes and fears,
of loves and hates, if desires and preferences are to be steady,
ordered, charged with meaning, secure.

The glorification of knowledge as the exclusive avenue of
access to what is real is not gong to give way soon nor all at
once. But it can hardly endure indefinitely. The more wide-
spread become the habits of intelligent thought, the fewer
enemies they meet from those vested interests and social insti-
tutions whose power depends upon immunity from inspection
by intelligence, in short, the more matter of course they be-
come, the less need will there seem to be for giving knowledge
an exclusive and monopolistic position. It will be prized for its
fruits rather than for the properties assigned to it when it was a
new and precarious enterprise. The common fact that we prize

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in proportion to rarity has a good de?l to do with the exclu-
sive esteem in which knowledge has been held. There is so
much unintelligent appetite and impulse, so much routine
action, so much that is dictated by the arbitrary power of other
persons, so much, in short, that is not informed and enlight-
ened by knowledge, that it is not surprising that action and
knowledge should have been isolated in thought from one
another, and knowledge treated as if it alone had dealings
with real existence. I do not know when knowledge will
become naturalized in the life of society. But when it is fully
acclimatized, its instrumental, as distinct from its monopolistic,
role in approach to things of nature and society will be taken
for granted without need for such arguments as I have been
engaging in. Meantime, the development of the experimental
method stands as a prophecy of the possibility of the accom-
plishment of this Copernican Revolution.

Whenever anyone speaks about the relation of knowledge
(especially if the word science be used) to our moral, artistic
and religious interests, there are two dangers to which he is
exposed. There exist on one hand efforts to use scientific
knowledge to substantiate moral and religious beliefs, either
with respect to some specific form in which they are current
or in some vague way that is felt to be edifying and com-
forting. On the other hand, philosophers derogate the im-
portance and necessity of knowledge in order to make room
for an undisputed sway of some set of moral and religious
tenets. It may be that preconceptions will lead some to inter-
pret what has been said in one or other of these senses. If so,
it is well to state that not a word has been said in depreciation
of science} what has been criticized is a philosophy and habit
of mind on the ground of which science is prized for false
reasons. Nor does this negative statement cover the whole
ground. Knowledge is instrumental. But the purport of our

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whole discussion has been in praise of tools, instrumentalities,
means, putting them on a level equal in value to ends and
consequences, since without them the latter are merely acci-
dental, sporadic and unstable. To call known objects, in their
capacity of being objects of knowledge, means is to appreciate
them, not to depreciate them.

Affections, desires, purposes, choices are going to endure
as long as man is man j therefore as long as man is man, there
are going to be ideas, judgments, beliefs about values. Nothing
could be sillier than to attempt to justify their existence at
large j they are going to exist anyway. What is inevitable needs
no proof for its existence. But these expressions of our nature
need direction, and direction is possible only through knowl-
edge. When they are informed by knowledge, they themselves
constitute, in their directed activity, intelligence in operation.
Thus as far as concerns particular value-beliefs, particular
moral and religious ideas and creeds, the import of what has
been said is that they need to be tested and revised by the best
knowledge at command. The moral of the discussion is any-
thing but a reservation for them of a position in which they
are exempt from the impact, however disintegrative it may be,
of new knowledge.

The relation between objects as known and objects with
respect to value is that between the actual and the possible.
"The actual" consists of given conditions} "the possible" de-
notes ends or consequences not now existing but which the
actual may through its use bring into existence. The possible
in respect to any given actual situation is thus an ideal for that
situation} from the standpoint of operational definition of
thinking in terms of action the ideal and the possible are
equivalent ideas. Idea and ideal have more in common than
certain letters of the alphabet. Everywhere an idea, in its intel-
lectual content, is a projection of what something existing may

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come to be. One may report a quality already sensed in a
proposition, as when standing before the fire I remark upon
how hot it is. When seeing something at a distance, I judge
without sensible contact that it must be hot} "hot" expresses
a consequence which I infer would be experienced if I were
to approach close enough j it designates a possibility of what is
actually there in experience. The instance is a trivial one, but
it sets forth what happens in every case where any predicate,
whether quality or relation, expresses an idea rather than a
sensibly perceived characteristic. The difference is not between
one mental state called a sensation and another called an image.
It is between what is experienced as being already there and
what marks a possibility of being experienced. If we agree to
leave out the eulogistic savor of "ideal" and define it in con-
trast with the actual, the possibility denoted by an idea is the
ideal phase of the existent.

The problem of the connection or lack of connection of the
actual and the ideal has always been the central problem of
philosophy in its metaphysical aspect, just as the relation
between existence and idea has been the central theme of
philosophy on the side of the theory of knowledge. Both issues
come together in the problem of the relation of the actual and
the possible. Both problems are derived from the necessities
of action if that is to be intelligently regulated. Assertion of
an idea or of an ideal, if it is genuine, is a claim that it is pos-
sible to modify what exists so that it will take on a form pos-
sessed of specifiable traits. This statement as it relates to an
idea, to the cognitive aspect, takes us back to what has been
said about ideas as designations of operations and their con-
sequences. Its bearing upon the "ideal" concerns us at this
point.

In this basic problem of the relation of the actual and
ideal, classic philosophies have always attempted to prove that

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the ideal is already and eternally a property of the real. The
quest for absolute cognitive certainty has come to a head in
the quest for an ideal which is one with the ultimately real.
Men have not been able to trust either the world or them-
selves to realize the values and qualities which are the possi-
bilities of nature. The sense of incompetency and the sloth
born of desire for irresponsibility have combined to create an
overwhelming longing for the ideal and rational as an ante-
cedent possession of actuality, and consequently something
upon which we can fall back for emotional support in times of
trouble.

The assumption of the antecedent inherent identity of
actual and ideal has generated problems which have not been
solved. It is the source of the problem of evil; of evil not
merely in the moral sense, but in that of the existence of de-
fect and aberration, of uncertainty and error, of all deviation
from the perfect. If the universe is in itself ideal, why is there
so much in our experience of it which is so thoroughly unideal?
Attempts to answer this question have always been compelled
to introduce lapse from perfect Being: some kind of fall to
which is due the distinction between noumena and phenomena,
things as they really are and as they seem to be. There
are many versions of this doctrine. The simplest, though
not the one which has most commended itself to most phi-
losophers, is the idea of the "fall of man," a fall which, in
the words of Cardinal Newman, has implicated all creation in
an aboriginal catastrophe. I am not concerned to discuss them
and their respective weaknesses and strengths. It is enough to
note that the philosophies which go by the name of Idealism
are attempts to prove by one method or another, cosmological,
ontological or epistemological, that the Real and the Ideal are
one, while at the same time they introduce qualifying addi-
tions to explain why after all they are not one.

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There are three ways of idealizing the world. There is
idealization through purely intellectual and logical processes,
in which reasoning alone attempts to prove that the world has
characters that satisfy our highest aspirations. There are, again,
moments of intense emotional appreciation when, through a
happy conjunction of the state of the self and of the surround-
ing world, the beauty and harmony of existence is disclosed
in experiences which are the immediate consummation of all
for which we long. Then there is an idealization through
actions that are directed by thought, such as are manifested in
the works of fine art and in all human relations perfected by
loving care. The first path has been taken by many philoso-
phies. The second while it lasts is the most engaging. It sets
the measure of our ideas of possibilities that are to be realized
by intelligent endeavor. But its objects depend upon fortune
and are insecure. The third method represents the way of
deliberate quest for security of the values that are enjoyed by
grace in our happy moments.

That in fortunate moments objects of complete and ap-
proved enjoyment are had is evidence that nature is capable
of giving birth to objects that stay with us as ideal. Nature
thus supplies potential material for embodiment of ideals.
Nature, if I may use the locution, is idealizable. It lends itself
to operations by which it is perfected. The process is not a
passive one. Rather nature gives, not always freely but in
response to search, means and material by which the values we
judge to have supreme quality may be embodied in existence.
It depends upon the choice of man whether he employs what
nature provides and for what ends he uses it.

Idealism of this type is not content with dialectical proofs
that the perfect is already and immutably in Being, either as
a property of some higher power or as an essence. The emo-
tional satisfactions and encouragements thus supplied are not

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an adequate substitute for an ideal which is projected in order
to be a guide of our doings. While the happy moment brings us
objects to admire, approve and revere, the security and extent
in which the beautiful, the true and the revered qualify the
world, depend upon the way in which our own affections and
desires for that kind or world engage activities. Things loved,
admired and revered, things that spiritualistic philosophies
have seized upon as the defining characters of ultimate Being,
are genuine elements of nature. But without the aid and sup-
port of deliberate action based on understanding of conditions,
they are transitory and unstable, as well as narrow and confined
in the number of those who enjoy them.

Religious faiths have come under the influence of philoso-
phies that have tried to demonstrate the fixed union of the
actual and ideal in ultimate Being. Their interest in persuad-
ing to a life of loyalty to what is esteemed good, has been
bound up with a certain creed regarding historical origins.
Religion has also been involved in the metaphysics of sub-
stance, and has thrown in its lot with acceptance of certain
cosmogonies. It has found itself fighting a battle and a losing
one with science, as if religion were a rival theory about the
structure of the natural world. It has committed itself to asser-
tions about astronomical, geological, biological subject-matter j
about questions of anthropology, literary criticism, and history.
With the advances of sciences in these fields it has in conse-
quence found itself involved in a series of conflicts, compro-
mises, adjustments and retreats.

The religious attitude as a sense of the possibilities of
existence and as devotion to the cause of these possibilities, as
distinct from acceptance of what is given at the time, gradu-
ally extricates itself from these unnecessary intellectual com-
mitments. But religious devotees rarely stop to notice that
what lies at the basis of recurrent conflicts with scientific find-

303

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

ings is not this or that special dogma so much as it is alliance
with philosophical schemes which hold that the reality and
power of whatever is excellent and worthy of supreme devo-
tion, depends upon proof of its antecedent existence, so that the
ideal of perfection loses its claim over us unless it can be dem-
onstrated to exist in the sense in which the sun and stars exist.

Were it not because of this underlying assumption, there
could be no conflict between science and religion. The currency
of attempts to reconcile scientific conclusions with special doc-
trines of religion may unfortunately suggest, when such a
statement is made, the idea of some infallible recipe for con-
ciliation. But nothing is further from its meaning. It signifies
that a religious attitude would surrender once for all commit-
ment to beliefs about matters of fact, whether physical, social
or metaphysical. It would leave such matters to inquirers in
other fields. Nor would it substitute in their place fixed beliefs
about values, save the one value of the worth of discovering
the possibilities of the actual and striving to realize them.
Whatever is discovered about actual existence would modify
the content of human beliefs about ends, purposes and goods.
But it would and could not touch the fact that we are capable of
directing our affection and loyalty to the possibilities resident
in the actualities discovered. An idealism of action that is de-
voted to creation of a future, instead of to staking itself upon
propositions about the past, is invincible. The claims of the
beautiful to be admired and cherished do not depend upon
ability to demonstrate statements about the past history of art.
The demand of righteousness for reverence does not depend
upon ability to prove the existence of an antecedent Being who
is righteous.

It is not possible to set forth with any accuracy or complete-
ness just what form religion would take if it were wedded to
an idealism of this sort, or just what would happen if it broke

304

THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION

away from that quest for certitude in the face of peril and
human weakness which has determined its historic and insti-
tutional career. But some features of the spirit of the change
which would follow may be indicated. Not the least impor-
tant change would be a shift from the defensive and apolo-
getic position which is practically compulsory as long as
religious faith is bound up with defense of doctrines regarding
history and physical nature j for this entanglement subjects it
to constant danger of conflict with science. The energy which
is thus diverted into defense of positions that have in time
to be surrendered would be released for positive activity in
behalf of the security of the underlying possibilities of actual
life. More important still would be liberation from attach-
ment to dogmas framed in conditions very unlike those in
which we live, and the substitution of a disposition to turn
to constructive account the results of knowledge.

It is not possible to estimate the amelioration that would
result if the stimulus and support given to practical action
by science were no longer limited to industry and commerce
and merely "secular" affairs. As long as the practical import
of the advance of science is confined to these activities, the
dualism between the values which religion professes and the
urgent concerns of daily livelihood will persist. The gulf
between them will continually grow wider, and the widening
will not, judging from past history, be at the expense of the
territory occupied by mundane and secular affairs. On the con-
trary, ideal interests will be compelled to retreat more and
more to a confined ground.

The philosophy which holds that the realm of essence sub-
sists as an independent realm of Being also emphasizes that
this is a realm of possibilities} it offers this realm as the true
object of religious devotion. But, by definition, such pos-
sibilities are abstract and remote. They have no concern nor

305

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

traffic with natural and social objects that are concretely expe-
rienced. It is not possible to avqid the impression that the idea
of such a realm is simply the hypostatizing in a wholesale way
of the fact that actual existence has its own possibilities. But
in any case devotion to such remote and unattached possibili-
ties simply perpetuates the other-worldliness of religious tra-
dition, although its other-world is not one supposed to exist.
Thought of it is a refuge, not a resource. It becomes effective
in relation to the conduct of life only when separation of
essence from existence is cancelled j when essences are taken
to be possibilities to be embodied through action in concrete
objects of secure experience. Nothing is gained by reaching
the latter through a circuitous course.

Religious faith which attaches itself to the possibilities of
nature and associated living would, with its devotion to the
ideal, manifest piety toward the actual. It would not be queru-
lous with respect to the defects and hardships of the latter.
Respect and esteem would be given to that which is the means
of realization of possibilities, and to that in which the ideal is
embodied if it ever finds embodiment. Aspiration and endeavor
are not ends in themselves ; value is not in them in isolation
but in them as means to that reorganization of the existent in
which approved meanings are attained. Nature and society in-
clude within themselves projection of ideal possibilities and
contain the operations by which they are actualized. Nature
may not be worshiped as divine even in the sense of the intel-
lectual love of Spinoza. But nature, including humanity, with
all its defects and imperfections, may evoke heartfelt piety
as the source of ideals, of possibilities, of aspiration in their
behalf, and as the eventual abode of all attained goods and
excellencies.

I have no intention of entering into the field of the psychol-
ogy of religion, that is to say, the personal attitudes involved

306

THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION

in religious experience. But I suppose that no one can deny
that the sense of dependence, insisted upon, for example, by
Sohleiermacher, comes close to the heart of the matter. This
sense has taken many different forms in connection with dif-
ferent states of culture. It has shown itself in abject fears, in
practice of extreme cruelties designed to propitiate the powers
upon which we depend, and in militantly fanatical intolerance
on the part of those who felt that they had special access to
the ultimate source of power and a peculiar authorization to
act in its behalf. It has shown itself in noble humilities and
unquenchable ardors. History shows that there is no channel in
which the sense of dependence is predestined to express itself.
But of the religious attitude which is allied to acceptance
of the ideally good as the to-be-realized possibilities of exist-
ence, one statement may be made with confidence. At the best,
all our endeavors look to the future and never attain certainty.
The lesson of probability holds for all forms of activity as
truly as for the experimental operations of science, and even
more poignantly and tragically. The control and regulation of
which so much has been said never signifies certainty of out-
come, although the greater meed of security it may afford will
not be known until we try the experimental policy in all walks
of life. The unknown surrounds us in other forms of practical
activity even more than in knowing, for they reach further
into the future, in more significant and less controllable ways.
A sense of dependence is quickened by that Copernican revo-
lution which looks to security amid change instead of to cer-
tainty in attachment to the fixed.

It would, moreover, alter its dominant quality. One of the
deepest of moral traditions is that which identifies the source
of moral evil, as distinct from retrievable error, with pride,
and which identifies pride with isolation. This attitude of
pride assumes many forms. It has found among those who

307

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

profess the most complete dependence, often preeminently
among them. The pride of the zealously devout is the most
dangerous form of pride. There is a divisive pride of the
learned, as well as of family wealth and power. The pride of
those who feel themselves learned in the express and explicit
will of God is the most exclusive. Those who have this pride,
one that generates an exclusive institutionalism and then feeds
and sustains itself through its connection with an institution
claiming spiritual monopoly, feel themselves to be special
organs of the divine, and in its name claim authority over
others.

The historic isolation of the church from other social in-
stitutions is the result of this pride. The isolation, like all
denials of interaction and interdependence, confines to special
channels the power of those who profess special connection
with the ideal and spiritual. In condemning other modes of
human association to an inferior position and role, it breeds
irresponsibility in the latter. This result is perhaps the most
serious of the many products of that dualism between nature
and spirit in which isolation of the actual and the possible
eventuates. The sense of dependence that is bred by recogni-
tion that the intent and effort of man are never final but are
subject to the uncertainties of an indeterminate future, would
render dependence universal and shared by all. It would
terminate the most corroding form of spiritual pride and
isolation, that which divides man from man at the foundation
of life's activities. A sense of common participation in the in-
evitable uncertainties of existence would be coeval with a sense
of common effort and shared destiny. Men will never love
their enemies until they cease to have enmities. The antago-
nism between the actual and the ideal, the spiritual and the
natural, is the source of the deepest and most injurious of all
enmities.

308

THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION

What has been said might seem to ignore the strength of
those traditions in which are enshrined the emotions and im-
aginations of so many human beings, as well as the force of
the established institutions by which these traditions are car-
ried. I am, however, engaged only in pointing out the possi-
bility of a change. This task does not require us to ignore the
practical difficulties in the way of realizing it. There is one
aspect of these difficulties which is pertinent at this point. It is
appropriate to inquire as to the bearing of them upon the
future office of philosophy. A philosophy committed to rational
demonstration of the fixed and antecedent certainty of the
ideal, with a sharp demarcation of knowledge and higher
activity from all forms of practical activity, is a philosophy
which perpetuates the obstacles in the way of realization of
the possibility that has been pointed out. It is easy both to
minimize the practical effect of philosophic theories and to
exaggerate it. Directly, it is not very great. But as an intel-
lectual formulation and justification of habits and attitudes
already obtaining among men its influence is immense. The
vis inertiae of habit is tremendous, and when it is reinforced
by a philosophy which also is embodied in institutions, it is so
great as to be a factor in sustaining the present confusion and
conflict of authorities and allegiances.

A final word about philosophy is then in place. Like reli-
gion it has come into conflict with the natural sciences, or at
least its path has diverged increasingly from theirs since the
seventeenth century. The chief cause of the split is that philos-
ophy has assumed for its function a knowledge of reality. This
fact makes it a rival instead of a complement to. the sciences. It
has forced philosophy into claiming a kind of knowledge which
is more ultimate than theirs. In consequence it has, at least in
its more systematic forms, felt obliged to revise the conclusions
of science to prove that they do not mean what they sayj or

309

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

tfiat, in any case they apply to a world of appearances instead
of to the superior reality to which philosophy directs itself.
Idealistic philosophies have attempted to prove from an ex-
amination of the conditions of knowledge that mind is the only
reality. What does it matter, they have said in effect, if phy-
sical knowledge recognizes only matter, since matter itself is
mental? Idealisms in proving that the ideal is once for all the
real has absolved itself fr6m the office, more useful if hum-
bler, of attempting that interpretation of the actual by means
of which values could be made more extensive and more
secure.

General ideas, hypotheses, are necessary in science itself.
They serve an indispensable purpose. They open new points
of view; they liberate us from the bondage of habit which is
always closing in on us, restricting our vision both of what is
and of what the actual may become. They direct operations
that reveal new truths and new possibilities. They enable us
to escape from the pressure of immediate circumstance and
provincial boundaries. Knowledge falters when imagination
clips its wings or fears to use them. Every great advance in
science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What
are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course
because they have withstood the tests of experiment and have
emerged triumphant, were once speculative hypotheses.

There is no limit set to the scope and depth of hypotheses.
There are those of short and technical range and there are
those as wide as experience. Philosophy has always claimed
universality for itself. It will make its claim good when it con-
nects this universality with the formation of directive hypoth-
eses instead of with a sweeping pretension to knowledge of
universal Being. That hypotheses are fruitful when they are
suggested by actual need, are bulwarked by knowledge already
attained, and are tested by the consequences of the operations

310

THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION

they evoke goes without saying. Otherwise imagination is dis-
sipated into fantasies and rises vaporously into the clouds.

The need for large and generous ideas in the direction
of life was never more urgent than in the confusion of
tongues, beliefs and purposes that characterizes present life.
Knowledge of actual structure and processes of existence has
reached a point where a philosophy which has the will to use
knowledge has guidance and support. A philosophy which
abandoned its guardianship of fixed realities, values and ideals,
would find a new career for itself. The meaning of science in
terms of science, in terms of knowledge of the actual, may
well be left to science itself. Its meaning in terms of the great
human uses to which it may be put, its meaning in the service
of possibilities of secure value, offers a field for exploration
which cries out from very emptiness. To abandon the search
for absolute and immutable reality and value may seem like
a sacrifice. But this renunciation is the condition of entering
upon a vocation of greater vitality. The search for values to
be secured and shared by all, because buttressed in the founda-
tions of social life, is a quest in which philosophy would have
no rivals but coadjutors in men of good will.

Philosophy under such conditions finds itself in no oppo-
sition to science. It is a liaison officer between the conclusions
of science and the modes of social and personal action through
which attainable possibilities are projected and striven for. No
more than a religion devoted to inspiration and cultivation of
the sense of ideal possibilities in the actual would it find itself
checked by any possible discovery of science. Each new dis-
covery would afford a new opportunity. Such a philosophy
would have a wide field of criticism before it. But its critical
mind would be directed against the domination exercised by
prejudice, narrow interest, routine custom and the authority
which issues from institutions apart from the human ends they

3"

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

serve. This negative office would be but the obverse of the
creative work of the imagination in pointing to the new possi-
bilities which knowledge of the actual discloses and in project-
ing methods for their realization in the homely everyday
experience of mankind.

Philosophy has often entertained the ideal of a complete
integration of knowledge. But knowledge by its nature is
analytic and discriminating. It attains large syntheses, sweep-
ing generalizations. But these open up new problems for con-
sideration, new fields for inquiry j they are transitions to more
detailed and varied knowledge. Diversification of discoveries
and the opening up of new points of view and new methods
are inherent in the progress of knowledge. This fact defeats the
idea of any complete synthesis of knowledge upon an intel-
lectual basis. The sheer increase of specialized knowledge will
never work the miracle of producing an intellectual whole.
Nevertheless, the need for integration of specialized results of
science remains, and philosophy should contribute to the satis-
faction of the need.

The need, however, is practical and human rather than
intrinsic to science itself j the latter is content as long as it can
move to new problems and discoveries. The need for direction
of action in large social fields is the source of a genuine
demand for unification of scientific conclusions. They are
organized when their bearing on the conduct of life is dis-
closed. It is at this point that the extraordinary and multifa-
rious results of scientific inquiry are unorganized, scattered,
chaotic. The astronomer, biologist, chemist, may attain sys-
tematic wholes, at least for a time, within his own field. But
when we come to the bearing of special conclusions upon the
conduct of social life, we are, outside of technical fields, at a
loss. The force of tradition and dogmatic authority is due,
more than to anything else, to precisely this defect. Man has

312

THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION

never had such a varied body of knowledge in his possession
before, and probably never before has he been so uncertain
and so perplexed as to what his knowledge means, what it
points to in action and in consequences.

Were there any consensus as to the significance of what is
known upon beliefs about things of ideal and general value,
our life would be marked by integrity instead of by distrac-
tion and by conflict of competing aims and standards. Needs of
practical action in large and liberal social fields would give
unification to our special knowledge} and the latter would give
solidity and confidence to the judgment of values that control
conduct. Attainment of this consensus would mean that modern
life had reached maturity in discovering the meaning of its
own intellectual movement. It would find within its own inter-
ests and activities the authoritative guidance for its own affairs
which it now vainly seeks in oscillation between outworn tradi-
tions and reliance upon casual impulse.

The situation defines the vital office of present philosophy.
It has to search out and disclose the obstructions} to criticize
the habits of mind which stand in the way} to focus reflection
upon needs congruous to present life} to interpret the conclu-
sions of science with respect to their consequences for our
beliefs about purposes and values in all phases of life. The
development of a system of thought capable of giving this
service is a difficult undertaking} it can proceed only slowly
and through cooperative effort. In these pages I have tried to
indicate in outline the nature of the task to be accomplished
and to suggest some of the resources at hand for its realization.

THE END

313

INDEX

Absolute and Absolutism, 6, 3, 109,
143, i6in., 264.

Abstraction, inn., I53'4> *59> l6 5>
216-8, 238, 246.

Action and Knowledge, 6, 7, 8, 30, 33,
35, 72, 86, 88, 150, 167, 194, 206, 211,
214, 223, 231, 245, 290; see Knowl-
edge, Operations, Theory.

Activity, pure, 17-19, 93.

Actual, 62, 299-301.

Agnosticism, 193.

Analysis, 92, 123, 174.

Antecedents and Consequences, 22,
44, 68, 72, 86, 103, 126, 129, 137,
146, 149, 165, 171, 185, 192, 196,
221, 230, 258, 266, 272.

Appearances, 19, 23, 30, 34, 104, 108,

1 10.

Application of science, 79-80, 86.
Appreciation, 221, 262, 268, 299.
A priorij see Reason.
Aristotle, 14-16, 40, 75, 91, 182*1, 243,

275, 282.
Arts, 3-6, 8, 30, 45, 47, 85, 100, 132,

138, 149, 207, 233, 254, 269, 297;

liberal and mechanical, 74; social,

40; and science, 75.
Authority, 95; conflict in, Ch. Ill;

seat of, Ch. VIII, 255, 261, 269, 285;

see Control, Standards.
Axioms, 141, 183.

Barry, F., 98, 153, 160-10.
Beliefs, 6, 17, 18, 26, 82, 56.
Bergson, H., 91.
Berkeley, Bishop, 121, 142.
Body, 82; and Mind, 230.
Bridgman, P. W., in, 204.

Causality, 159.

Certainty, 5, 33, 51, 60, 128, 204, 254;

see Control, Security.
Change, 16, 83, 84, 100-1, 105, 129,

131, 205, 211, 236-7, 251, 292-3; see

Immutables.
Church, the, 75-6, 255, 276, 282, 293,

308.
Cohen, M. R., inn.

Concrete, meaning of, 153-4.

Communication, 150.

Compossibility, 160.

Conception of conceptions, 1470.; em-
pirical, 166; and laws, 206-7; see
Ideas, Operations, Thought.

Consciousness, 86, 227-8.

Consequences, see Antecedents, Ends.

Contingency, 19, 201-4, 231, 244, 249-
54, 307; see Luck, Probability.

Continuity, 224, 230-1, 234, 240; see
Operations, Relations.

Control, 98, 100, 104, 105, 128, 172,
213, 241, 247, 259, 296; by arts, 3,
30; by rites, 3, 10, 223, 254; by in-
telligence, Ch. IV; two kinds, 84,
132; ground of, 133.

Crisis, 44, 52, 224.

CrisL in Culture, 40, 43, 47, 70, 77,
251.

Data, 99, 122, 134, 137, 172-3, 178.
Deduction, see Implication.
Definition, 50, 99, 126, 141, 152, 181.
Demonstration, 108, 112; see Proof

Test.

Dependence, 307.

Descartes, 42, 57, 61, 92, 141, 157.
Discovery, 183-5.
Discreteness, 114, 125, 142, 176, 181,

204, 232-4, 243.
Dualism, 13, 32, 51, 58, 76, 244, 270-1,

308.

Economics, 80, 211-2, 280-3.

Eddington, A. S., in, 129-30, 240.

Education, 252.

Einstein, A., 127, 144-6.

Emotion, 225-6.

Empiricism, 77, 107, 144.

Ends, 17, 20, 41, 49-50, 56-7, 94, 100,
102, 149, 152, 155, 236, 243; and
means, 37, 46.

Enjoyment, see Values.

Epistemology, 85, 121, 241.

Escape, from Peril, Ch. I; see Con-
trol.

3*5

INDEX

Essences, 34, 65, 90, 120, 140, 149-50,
164, 178, 275-6, 305-6; properties of
161-67.

Esthetic, 90, 94, 100, 153, 156, 185,

Euclid, 1 6, 89, 140, 157, 182.

Events, 83, 104, 126, 129, 146, 241.

Evil, 35, 64, 101, 301, 308.

Evolution, 64.

Experience, and Experienced Ob-
jects, 76, 98, 106-7, 137, 167-8, 194-
99, 216-9, 24i"3> 276, 294; as em-
pirical and experimental, 81-4.

Experimental Method, 5, 24, 36, 81,
87-107 and Ch. V, 168, 171, 186,
201, 214, 242, 263, 271, 273, 288-9.

Explanation, 181, 229.

Faith, 58.

Familiarity, 185-6, 209-10.

Fichte, 62.

First Philosophy, 14-15.

Freedom, 250.

Galileo, 93-7, 288.

Generalization, 125, 134.

Good, 15, 34, 53-5, Ch. X; see Ends,
Values.

Greek Science, see Aristotle, New-
tonian Philosophy.

Habit, inertia of intellectual, 84, 136,

175, 208, 238.
Hartshorne, C., 2497*.
Hegel, 61-63.
Heine, 59.

Heisenberg, 201-4, 248.
Heterogeneity and Homogeneity, 94,

97, 105, 122, 133, 241.
History, 246.
Holy, the, 11-12.
Hume, D., 142, 156.
Hypostitazation, 154, 165, 217, 239,

247, 264, 306; see Substance.
Hypothesis, 78, 107, 165-7, 173, '75,

179, 184, 186, 277, 288.

Idealism, 22, 34, 61-3, 108, 130, 138,
142, 166-7, 178, 188, 233, 257, 277,
294, 302, 310.

Ideals, 62, 108-9, 163, 270, 279, 297,
299-303.

Idealization, three modes of 302-3.

Ideas, 59, 86, 166-7, *73, *77 299-300;
and operations, Ch. V; free, and
mathematics, Ch. VI; see Reflective
Thought.

Identification, 188-91.

Immediacy, 108, 109, 127, 183, 186-7,
221, 2*5, 262.

Immutables, Ch. II; 18, 20, 22, 51, 90,
143, 161, 163, 209, 212, 250, 3";
see Change.

Incompatibility, 160.

Indemonstrables, see Axioms, Imme-
diacy.

Indeterminancy, 201-4; see Contin-
gency.

Individual, 6, 135, 146, 162, 170, 184,
203, 205-8, 218, 225, 236-7, 240, 247.

Industry and Industrialism, 24, 79-80,
217, 282, 304.

Inference, see Reflective Thinking.

Instrumental and Instrumentalism,
37W., 106, 135, 147, 205, 207, 218,
236-8, 250, 295, 298.

Intellectualism, 21, 56, 219; see Ubi-
quity, Vision.

Intelligence and Nature, Ch. VIII.

Intelligibility, of nature, 55, 208, 215.

Interaction, 23, 37, 78, 106-7, 150, 172,
177, 207, 214, 234-6, 239, 244, 290-1 ;
see Operations, Relations.

Intuition, 141, 183, 186.

Irrationality, of nature, 209-10,

James, Wm., 209, 238, 284-5.
Judgment, 137; defined, 213; 260, 265.

Kant and Kantianism, 42, 58-62, 287-

290.
Knowledge and Action, Ch. I, 36, 48,

82, 106, 137, 171-5, 204-6; theory of,

41, 47, 84, 181, 229; types of, 196-8,

221-2; unification of, 312.

Laissez-faire, 212.

Laplace, 201.

Laws, 28, 56-7, 201, 205-7, 247.

Life, 224.

Light, 127, 185, 202-4.

Locke, J., 26, 120, 184.

Logic, 15-16, 63, 65-6, 140, 154, 156,

1 60, 187, 197.
Logical Forms, 66, 88-9, 147, 197; ee

Essences.
Logos, 90, 92.
Luck, 7, 1 1 -12, 102, 223.

Machine, nature of, 162, 247.
Magic, 40.
Mass, 96, 127, 142.
Materialism, 77, 108, 283.
Mathematics, 16, 28, 57, 65, 88, 92,
97, 108, 127, 133, 203, 240, 254; in

316

INDEX

physics, 141-6; pure, 151-56; see

Symbols.
Matter, 96, 270.
Maxwell, C., 248-49,
Mead, G. H., 99.
Means, 45, 155, 162, 234, 237, 270;

see Antecedents, Consequences,

Ends.

Measurement, 87, 125, 152.
Mechanism, 209, 245.
Method, 2, 27, 36, 200, 215, 217, 228,

251; supremacy of, Ch. IX; see

Experimental Method.
Metric Objects, 129-30, 210, 240-2.
Michelson-Morley Experiment, 127,

145.

Mill, J. S., 112, 156, 182/1.
Morals, 6, 31, 39, 60, 101, 244, 251,

266, 272-30; see Values.
Motion, 96, 126, 133.
Movement, qualitative, 93.

Nature, 53, 55, 210, Ch. VIII, 243,

307; as God, 56.
Newman, Cardinal, 52, 301.
Newtonian Philosophy, 59, 97-8, no,

114-6, 142-4, 186, 191, 201-2, 204-5,

212, 231.
Noble, E., 2477*.

Non-being, 18, 19, 35; see Changes.
Novelty, 183-5.
Number, 129, 152, 155.

Objects, Perceived; see Experience,

Perception, Qualities.
Objects, Physical, 99, 104.
Observation, 82, 84, 143, 146, 172, 202,

206-7.
Operations, 84, Ch. V, Passim, 137,

173-74, 200, 217, 258 origin of, 123.
Opinion, 20, 22, 83, 95.

Participation, 204, 212, 245, 291, 308.

Pathology, of beliefs, 227-8.

Peirce, C. S., 37;*., 145.

Perception, 82, 88-90, 121, 142, 176-9*
230, 240^ 267-8; see Observation,
Sense.

Peril, Ch ; I passim, 3-5, 6, 33, 223.

Peripatetic Philosophy, see Aristotle.

Phenomena, 59, 148, 242, 301 ; nature
of, 104.

Phenomenalism, 193.

Philosophy, 4, 13, 14, 18, 24, 30, 66-
70; modern problem of, Ch. II, es-
pecially, 41, 44, 49, 67, 72, 103, 195,
284; true problem of, 46, 67, 168-9,
*5S-6, 309-3*3-

Physical, 20, 64, 78, 79, 186, 189, 238-

41; science, Chs. V, VI, passim;

217-221.

Plato, 140, 157, 181, 269, 274.
Possibility, 155-60, 163-4, 226, 259,

299-303, 311; see Symbols.
Practice, depreciated, 4-5, 13, 22, 29,

37; meaning of, 31-32.
Pragmatism, 37;*.
Primitive Life, 9-10, 33, 38, 101, 254,

284.
Probability, 6, 26, 199, 202, 267, 290,

307.
Problem, importance of, 99-103, 122-3,

134, 176, 179, 206, 218, 223-236, 243*

247.

Proof, 181, 183.
Purpose, 102, 245-6.

Qualities and Qualitative Objects, Chs.
II and III, passim; 89, 173, 231,
233, 239; in modern science, 53,
159; primary and secondary, 120-1;
tertiary, 239; static, 125; see Data,
Esthetic.

Quantity, 92.

Rationalism, 27, 83, 122, 144, 154, 165,

171, 180, 210, 256-7, 264.
Realism, 65, 176, 178, 184, 240, 257,

2 74 2 95> 35'6; see Essences.
Reason, 17, 50, 58, 76, 88, 90, 109,

170, 212, 287-8, 292.
Recognition, 185.
Reflective Thinking, 109, 141, 178,

181-4, 2I $-9, 221, 262.
Relations, 84, 92, 102, 104, 120, 125,

130, 133, 145-6, 154, 159, 162, 168,

174, 176, 184, 207, 219, 244, 250,

266.

Relativity, theory of, 127, 145.
Religion, 10-14, 30, 51-2, 70, 160, 221,

254, 292, 298, 303-9.
Revolution, Copernican, Ch. XI.
Revolution, Scientific, 28, 50, 85, 87-

8, 92, 255, 258.

Santayana, G., 239.
Satisfaction, 258-60.
Science, 20, 22, 24, 26, 41; and art,

75; physical, 78; and the real, 136,

207, 217-21, 246, 250.
Schleiermacher, 307.
Security, Ch. I passim, 23, 29, 33, 35,

37, 132, 187, 204; see Control,

Values.
Sensational Empiricism, 22, 109, 122,

156, 166, 171, 177.

317

INDEX

Sense, 82-3, 88-90, 112, 143, 156, 170,

230, 258; see Data, Perception.
Sense Data, 65, 174-7, *95
Signs, 99, 129, 132, 175, 213, 236, 239,

241.

Simultaneity, 145.
Skepticism, 193-4, 219, 228.
Social Knowledge and Objects, 186,

198, 216-8, 270-1.
Solutions, see Problems, Security,

Thought.

Space, 126, 133, 142, 159.
Spectator Theory of Knowledge, see

Vision.

Spencer, H., 64.

Spinoza, B., 53-57, 141, 209, 288, 307.
Standards, 54, 163, 167, 170, 200, 239,

^55, 273, 277; see Test, Validity.
Subjective and Subjectivism, 31, 47,

60, 150, 214, 232-3, 239, 241-2, 246,

274-5, 280, 287.
Structure, 148, 163.
Substance, 119-20, 128, 186, 206, 303.
Supernatural, n, 230.
Symbols, 150-54, 217.

Taste, 262.

Technology, 124, 75, 80, 133, 268.

Tertiary, see Qualities.

Test, 103, 109, 122, 124, 128, 135;

165-7, 2 37 2 ?*-
Theology, 14, 28, 52, 75.
Theory, placed above action, 5-6, 22,

29; in relation to practice, 67-70,

192-3, 281.

This and The, 237-8, 241.

Thought, 7, 108; as directed activity,
123, 134, 162, 166, 223, 267; de-
fined, 224, 227.

Time and Temporal, 95, 101, 126,
i33, H2, H5, 234, 272, 289.

Tools, 8, 84, 89, 124, 135, 136, 148,
152, 186, 187, 233, 278; see Instru-
mental.

Tradition, Classic, 8, 17, 21, 26-8, 34,
43, 76, 133, 199-200, 214, 231, 287-8,

293-
Transcendentalism, 34, 60, 78, 164-5,

256-7, 285
Truth, see Antecedents, Consequences,

Test, Validity.

Ubiquity of Knowledge, 106, 131, 179,

219, 241, 291-5, 297-8.
Uncertainty, 38-9, 65, 223-36, 244.
Uniformity, 162-3, 208.
Universals, 20, 141, 154, 161, 163.
Use and Utility, 40, 105.
Utilitarianism, 31, 257.

Validity, 43, 60, 109, 129, 141, 146,

197, 263.
Values, 21, 24, 30, 32, 35, 39, 42-3,

65-7, 95, 98, 194, 196, 233, .Ch. X.
Verification, see Test, Validity.
Vision, as knowledge, 23, 196, 213,

245.

Will, 52, 58, 213, 226, 233.

Work, as a curse, 4; as material, 5.

318